By Staff
Athletic Management, 15.6, October/November 2003, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/am/am1506/wujerseys.htm
Like most athletic directors, Joe Skowronski has watched plenty of ceremonies before football games. But last year, he saw something new that impressed him so much he wasted little time in duplicating it at his own school.
What Skowronski saw was Faculty-Staff Appreciation Night, held annually at Thornton Fractional South High School in Lansing, Ill. Before the game, each TF South player was accompanied onto the field by a faculty or staff member the player had personally chosen to honor. The faculty or staff member was outfitted in the player’s road jersey, which he or she also wore during the school day.
“I saw that and said, ‘Wow! What a great idea,’” says Skowronski, Athletic Director at Eisenhower High School in Blue Island, Ill. “It was so nice to see the faculty and staff members together with the students. It seemed like a great way for students to show respect for their teachers, or other people in the building, who had maybe changed their lives a little bit.”
TF South Athletic Director Robert Mitchell gives credit for the idea to his Head Football Coach, Tom Padjen. “About four years ago, we were talking about different ways to get more staff members from our building to come to our games, and he came up with this idea,” Mitchell says. “It’s worked awfully well.
“In athletics, you understand the role you’re playing, but sometimes a teacher who isn’t involved in an activity doesn’t really understand how much of a role model they are to certain individuals,” Mitchell continues. “When a football player comes up to them and asks if they would do this, I’ll tell you, it’s an ego boost. A couple of our teachers got tears in their eyes because they were so flattered by it. They said, ‘My gosh. I didn’t realize this student liked me that much.’ It’s a great bonding experience.”
The program is also meaningful for the student-athletes. “Every student-athlete has a favorite teacher,” Mitchell says. “And a lot of times they like to be able to show that teacher, ‘This is how much you mean to me.’”
Skowronski began using the program at Eisenhower in the winter with the boys’ and girls’ varsity basketball teams and the varsity cheerleaders. “We sent a notice out to all the faculty and staff members in the building that this was going on,” he says. “We asked that if a student asks them to participate, to either accept or decline, but I didn’t hear of anybody who declined. Everybody I talked with was tremendously positive about it.
“There were a couple of athletes who were shy and hadn’t asked anybody until the very end,” Skowronski continues. “So we suggested people to them or even walked the athlete ourselves to this person and said, ‘Would you be interested?’”
In adapting the idea to basketball, Skowronski had to find a way around the fact that many faculty and staff members would have a hard time fitting into some of the basketball jerseys, not to mention cheerleader uniforms. So instead, he had four-inch buttons made up for those who didn’t fit into the jersey, which the honoree wore throughout the day. The buttons read: “Faculty and Staff Appreciation Day Honoree” with the name of the athlete and his or her sport.
“We marched them all out prior to the varsity game and took a big picture,” Skowronski says. “It was a neat thing.”
Skowronski wore one of the buttons himself as he was selected by a cheerleader to be honored. “I’m also a dean here and the person who chose me was actually someone I never thought would do that because I had to give her some grief during the year,” he says. “It was nice to be selected because it showed me that even though there were some things that had gone on, she still had some respect for me. It really meant a lot to me.”
Mitchell adds one more piece of advice about the program. “I think one of the key things is letting the visiting team know about the ceremony a week or so beforehand,” he says. “For our football game, we tell them, ‘We’ll put 25 minutes on the clock and run it down. You can warm up on the other end of the field.’ We don’t want to make this a distraction for them because they have a game to play. As long as you inform your opponent what’s going to happen that night, nobody should get upset.”
And Mitchell was anything but upset to see the idea migrate from his school to another. “Eisenhower asked if we would mind if they did it, too,” he says. “It was flattering to us that somebody else wanted to do something we did.”
Skowronski believes it’s important to keep your eyes open for any ideas that you can adapt to your situation. “Don’t be afraid to borrow from other people when you see something that works,” he says. “None of us invented the wheel–we just use it. I talked to Bob Mitchell and asked him some questions, and from there I did a little bit of my own thing. But the main thing that I wanted was to make sure our faculty and staff members were represented and honored.”