Getting Ready for the season is taking on a new meaning in high school athletics programs across the country. In addition to off-season workouts, and designing offensive and defensive schemes, more than one million coaches and student-athletes spent considerable time in July and August preparing for the season with a focus on education.
Every year, more students and coaches in schools across the country are getting ready for the season by taking education courses through the NFHS Learning Center – the online platform (www.NFHSLearn.com) that offers more than 100 courses (more than 70 for free) for coaches and students, as well as administrators, officials, performing arts educators, parents and others.
In July and August this year, almost 1.5 million courses were taken through the Learning Center, which bettered July and August 2023 by almost 300,000, and an all-time record 893,000 courses were taken in August alone. These were not courses about how to run the end sweep in football or how to stop a promising attack in soccer. Instead, coaches and athletes were taking courses focused on reducing risk of injury and good sporting behavior during competition.
A breakdown of the almost 900,000 courses taken in August includes Concussion in Sports (220,000), Sudden Cardiac Arrest (157,000), Heat Illness Prevention (147,000), Concussion for Students (96,000) and Sportsmanship (60,000).
No level of sports in our nation is as focused on education as high school athletics. And no group has a larger and more profound educational presence than the NFHS – the national leader and advocate for high school athletics and performing arts programs.
Seventeen years after starting the NFHS Coach Education Program, the response by individuals to online learning continues to climb every year. With approximately 3.5 million courses taken since last August, the overall number of courses delivered since the start in 2007 is now approaching 24 million.
With the ever-present focus on sportsmanship and improving behavior in sports, the aforementioned free Sportsmanship course is used by many states and schools as a teaching tool, as well as a requirement for returning to competition after an ejection. The course, which debuted on the NFHS Learning Center in 2011, has been delivered to more than one million individuals in the past 13 years, and is among the top five most popular courses offered.
With sportsmanship being one of most important outcomes of involvement in education-based activity programs, perhaps appropriately, students have taken more than 70 percent of these courses in the past. Given the decline in behavior by other groups at high school games, the updated course reiterates the critical importance of positive behaviors by everyone – parents, coaches, students, officials and others.
And students are not just taking the Sportsmanship course. While the Learning Center was originally developed for coaches, the percentage of students taking courses has been rising each year. Among current registered users of the Learning Center, 2.8 million are coaches and 2.5 million are students.
One of those other courses being accessed by students is Football Tackling, which was released in February 2022 and which has already been accessed more than 71,000 times. This free course showcases proper tackling skills and techniques that can help minimize risks associated with the most popular high school sport for boys.
To complete the process of getting ready for the season, every high school coach should take Fundamentals of Coaching and CPR & AED Training. The newly revised Fundamentals of Coaching – the flagship coaching course on the Learning Center – has become a primary component for new-coach training in most NFHS-member state associations. This newest refresh, which was produced in collaboration with the University of Washington’s Center for Leadership in Athletics, marks the third time the course has been modernized in its 17-year history (2012, 2018).
The Fundamentals course, which was taken 14,000 times in August, has been delivered more than one million times since its debut in January 2007. The course provides the foundation for an interscholastic coach and presents what a coach needs to know and be able to do.
One of the newest and most important courses for coaches – and others in the high school community – is the CPR & AED Training course, which debuted last year and was delivered 5,500 times in August. The course highlights the importance of creating, implementing and maintaining an emergency action plan, along with identifying when a sudden cardiac arrest emergency is occurring. The course demonstrates what to do when someone collapses – calling 911 and managing the area, properly performing CPR and appropriate use of an AED.
We salute the hundreds of thousands of high school athletes and coaches who fully prepared themselves for the fall sports season – both on and off the field.
