What was sports participation like during your 16 years at Portsmouth High School?
We were around 800 or 900 students when I left [in 2011], and our athletic participation was probably between 40 and 50%. That was always the goal. We had good participation. Part of my charge was to engage kids with school, so that was definitely a focus. A lot of that depends on the number of offerings, too. We had almost every sport that the Interscholastic League had. We didn’t have volleyball or wrestling, but I think those were the only two.
Is the three-sport letter-winner a dying breed at the high school level?
Definitely. I started to see that back when I was an athletic director. The proliferation of youth travel sports and clubs — specialization — has had a huge impact on that. It’s kind of a battle that our schools fight, because there are countless college coaches who constantly talk about that. They’d rather see multisport participation for a lot of reasons, but people fall into the trap of feeling like they have to specialize in order to get where they want to go.
You’ve heard college coaches express that they would prefer to have a well-rounded athlete versus a specialist?
Because they develop different skill sets. If you poll college coaches, I think you’ll find that the majority of them are looking for that. At Portsmouth, we had a Red Sox prospect who ended up signing for $2 million straight out of high school. He was a three-sport kid all the way through. He got recruited by Vanderbilt to play baseball, and going through that process, that was something that the parents were concerned about as he was getting older. Should he start to specialize? And that was the feedback that we had gotten. One of the things that intrigued them about him was he was a five-tool type of kid — all-state soccer player, he played basketball for me, and then he played baseball. I think that’s definitely a myth that’s out there that specialization is the way to go.
Did you counsel the family to keep him in three sports?
This particular kid just loved to play, so it wasn’t a real issue, but it’s certainly something that we talked about. We weren’t a large school, so I think we also relied on relied on multisport kids for our program.
Is this focus of yours on participation something recent — a reawakening, perhaps, if not an epiphany?
I wouldn’t say it’s an epiphany. I think it’s certainly something that, from my perspective in this position, we’ve seen. There’s such a turnover of people at our level now — coaches, athletic directors, principals — and what I wonder about is the messaging. I think we all get caught up in our jobs and responsibilities, but what is our purpose? The NFHS is really pushing a campaign called Protect the Purpose, and so I think it’s been at the forefront of my mind. Why were school-based sports created in the beginning, way back when? It’s something I used to say to our students at Portsmouth High School, just in general, when we would have conversations. “Why does our town provide this opportunity?” Just to quiz them. And a lot of times, they don’t put a lot of thought into that. They’ll say, “So we can have fun.” So, why are we spending money on it in a school setting? We just kind of get some dialogue going with them about it, and then they start to realize it’s about what you learn from the participation. I think that’s something that we always talk about, but as things are evolving around us, are we paying attention to that?
How long has NFHS been pushing the Protect the Purpose campaign?
This year. They just recently launched it. Actually, it’s something we’ve been working on with the federation across the board, with all state high school associations, and talking about what makes our space what it is. I think it’s a great conversation piece, because I think what’s happening around us tends to filter into our world, and so we talk about coaches. Coaches probably spend more time with students than some of the teachers. How much education are we giving the coaches? A lot of coaches in the school-based setting now aren’t necessarily teachers anymore, and so you have people coming from the outside into these positions and into an educational space who are not educators. Again, how much training and education are they getting about what their responsibilities are?
I’m glad you mentioned that, because that’s really a different dynamic from when we were in high school in the mid-1980s, isn’t it?
Absolutely. I remember when I became an AD in ’95 sitting in the principal’s office during teacher interviews. When they were offering teachers jobs, they would say to them, “Okay, well, what else can you do?” If you have two people who are coming in who can teach math and one of them can coach, well, I would assume that that person who can coach is going to have a leg up on the other candidate. I can just remember these conversations, and I think at some point — I don’t know, rules changed in the hiring process, whatever — we weren’t allowed to ask that anymore. If somebody was applying for a job, it was just that job.
It’s not nearly as common for coaches to be faculty members.
I think a lot of the standards have changed over time for teachers, and I think they’re not as accessible as they might have been before — or even willing. That’s why I have tremendous respect for athletic directors and school administrators and the challenge they have to recruit coaches. It’s getting more and more difficult. When we’re looking at emphasizing participation, are we bringing in people from outside with a different mentality into the educational world, and are we focusing on encouraging people to participate, as opposed to just solely focusing on building a winning program?
Perhaps there are relationships built in the classroom, and if a kid who’s on the fence about coming out for a team has a good relationship with the individual as a teacher first, he or she might be more willing to take that leap into sports. Fair to say?
Sure, and that’s the kid that I’m most concerned about. The pursuit of winning is important. As long as we’re keeping score, I think that’s definitely a focus. But what I think is great about school-based sports is that you can have all those different levels. You can be building a winning program, but there’s also plenty of room in your program for kids who may need us way more than we need them to build a winning program, and that’s the kid I feel we are starting to lose.
I have an older brother who likes to say, “High school is your last opportunity in life to suck at stuff” — his way of saying, “Get involved. Try things.” Have we as a society drifted from that sort of mindset to a focus on individual performance and team success?
Right. Why are these things happening? I have theories, but when you look at the youth level, at least in our area, you don’t see those recreational sports programs in town — house-type leagues. It’s like if you’re not on a travel circuit, paying a lot of money to participate, there’s not a whole lot of opportunity. And by the time they get to high school, maybe they’re not as apt to try something. We have certain sports that are skill-centric, sports that take time, like hockey. I mean, you’re not going to just pick up hockey when you get to high school. But when we look at our hockey numbers in the northeast, those house leagues are drying up to where if you’re not on that junior circuit, traveling and committing year-round, those third-line kids, so to speak, are not around anymore, because their primary focus might be another sport.
Did I read that Rhode Island has players from eight different high schools who comprise one co-op girls’ hockey team?
That’s true, but we also have standards. In other words, it’s not about the number of schools that are in a co-op. If you know the size of our state, you can drive anywhere across our state within an hour, so when these schools do co-op together, it’s not that big of a deal from a travel perspective.
I was just going to ask if there are there any downsides to that type of participation scenario.
It doesn’t matter how many schools you have in a co-op, but what matters is the total number of participants. If a school had a good number of kids, they can’t just arbitrarily go co-op with somebody. Each school in the co-op can’t go beyond a maximum number of students, and the total number of kids in the program can’t be above a certain number, as well. That way we can kind of balance things out a little bit, so that there’s some parity. Again, the whole point to this is to increase participation opportunities, not take them away. If two schools had a lot of kids interested in hockey and they wanted to co-op together, we wouldn’t allow that necessarily, if it was actually going to take away opportunities for kids in those situations. In hockey, we just don’t have a lot of kids participating in the sport anymore, so to keep the sport going, we’ve been allowing schools to enter into these co-ops. In other sports, I think what the concern is with co-ops is if one town had a kid that was a really good softball pitcher, and another town wanted to say, “Okay, let’s co-op together, because we want your pitcher,” that’s not a reason to co-op.
We’ve created some standards and regulations where there’s no-cut policies when schools enter into these agreements. But what I get concerned about with co-ops is that it’s not high school sports. It’s not school-based sports. It starts to morph into something that is not necessarily what we you and I would have remembered back in the ‘80s.
A little bit less identification, affinity and pride, I would think.
Right. Community-based types of things. And it’s really hard logistically for the schools to manage those situations, as well. Eligibility and finances — all those things get a little bit more clouded when you’re doing that. But again, over time, I think what you’ve seen state associations do with their memberships is just try to adapt to their needs, but also try to keep that balance of what school-based sports are supposed to be.
Are we seeing more co-op teams in 2025 than we did in 1985?
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. We didn’t have it then. I joke with people that back when I was in high school, we walked into the AD’s office and said, “Hey, we want to start a volleyball team.” And the AD said, “Well, how many kids do you have?” We said, “Four.” The answer wouldn’t be, “Co-op.” The answer would be, “We’re not having a volleyball team.” But again, I think that’s the evolution of things. We’re trying to create ways to keep kids engaged in school, but that philosophy — and the spirit of that — can get out of whack pretty quickly.
You met with coaches and administrators in August in Providence. Can you characterize the feedback you received among coaches and administrators from your discussions on participation?
In our state, because of our size, we’re lucky to be able to bring everybody together. We meet three times a year prior to each season with our athletic directors, and that’s in person. The feedback is always good. It’s an opportunity for us to come together as a membership and talk about what’s important and what to focus on during the course of the year. So, we just wanted to have that [topic of participation] front of mind, being intentional about how you do signups for sports. I’m sure it’s a little bit different in every school, but is it an online registration where people just go on and figure it out? To your point, back in the day, I think the lunchroom was a great place to recruit kids — being able to just talk about, “Hey, why don’t you come out for track?” We talked about things like that, about being intentional about the way we encourage participation. Ensuring that people understand and know what the opportunities are. The timing of it is important, too. If you’re doing signups a week out from the season, that might be problematic.
What is the state of high school NIL in Rhode Island?
What we’ve done — what many states have done across the country — is realize we can’t stop anyone from benefiting from their name, image and likeness from a legal standpoint. However, what our rules and regulations do is kind of protect our space. Anything that happens from an NIL perspective can’t involve the school — in other words, wearing a school uniform, use of a logo, those kinds of things. Because we all felt that we can’t really stop it, we just wanted to protect the high school space. So, the simple answer is, yes, it’s allowed — with some guardrails.
If you had your druthers, would high school athletes be prohibited from pursuing NIL deals in your state?
You know, I guess I’m a little conflicted on it, because I am old school about amateurism. But, again, I think what a lot of kids have now, especially in the social media world, is the opportunity to do — and benefit from — things that are really not connected to sports. So, who’s to say that that’s not okay? But I also fear that mentality creeping into the school space. We obviously don’t have collectives and those kinds of things, but the line gets drawn, and then we draw the line a little bit further. Where does it go from there?
Do you have one case study that stands out for you from your coaching days of the impact that mere participation in a team sport — basketball, in your case — had on a kid who maybe didn’t see a lot of court time?
One of the things I used to say was, “Our purpose is not what we do. It’s what happens to kids when we do what we do.” I have a picture in my office right now of a kid named Danny Marshall, who was a special needs student, and he showed up at Portsmouth High as a freshman. My office door was always open, and on the first day of school, I just I didn’t know who he was. He walked past my door and back the other way about five times, kept peeking, and I finally said, “Hey, can I help you?” He poked his head in, and he wanted to know when basketball tryouts were. Again, it was the first day of school, and pretty much every day until basketball tryouts, he came by my office and asked the same questions. This was just before Unified Sports, so I got in touch with his parents and basically told them he’s going to make the team, but I wanted him to go through the process just like everybody else. The bottom line was that Danny became part of our team. His parents told us he was shy, and about three or four games into the season, I came in during the JV game, and I looked over and he was just kind of sprawled out in the stands with 12 cheerleaders around him — like a rock star. When we had an opportunity to get him into a game, the crowd would always go crazy. The whole school embraced him. So, when we talk about inclusion and what that can do, how that can transform a kid, it was good for Danny, but it was good for our team, and it was good for our school. That’s the one I always talk about, because he just wanted to wear a school uniform, be part of the team. But we’ve also had plenty of other kids who stayed with us through the program who just never really got a lot of playing time. It was so important to us to have them around — as much as the benefits that they got out of it. That is the power of school-based sports. You can have the kid who ended up being drafted by the Red Sox on a field with a kid who’s never going to play beyond high school, and that’s what makes it special. I think about Elizabeth Beisel, who became an Olympic swimmer. She was way over our level in our state, but she wanted to have a high school experience. She said, “I just want to swim for my for my team, for my community, in school.” So she did. Again, that’s the range of kids that you’re dealing with.
Any final thoughts?
I guess the last thing I’ll say to you, Paul, is that I talk about this next level of life that we’re trying to get kids ready for, and of the 8 million kids across the country who are participating, 7% go on to play in college and 2% earn athletic scholarships, but 100% benefit from participation. That’s the point. If the sole purpose of what we’re doing is to win, then we’re doing something wrong
