Athletic Management, 16.2, February/March 2004, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/am/am1602/hamilton.htm
DECK
In 1993, after 26
years in high school athletics, 11 of which he served as both athletic
director and head basketball coach, Marshall Hamilton decided to take
on a new challenge. He moved from one of the oldest schools in North
Carolina, Broughton High School, to another school in Raleigh that was
just opening its doors. One of the state's top boys' basketball
coaches, Hamilton hung up his whistle to serve full time as athletic
director at Leesville Road High School.
Under his direction,
Leesville has won North Carolina's Wachovia Cup, an award based on
state tournament finishes, three times in its 11-year history. Named
North Carolina 4A Athletic Director of the Year in 2001, Hamilton has
also seen his school's coaches and student-athletes honored for their
sportsmanship by the NCHSAA for the past two years.
In this
interview, Hamilton discusses what makes a successful booster club,
scheduling boys' and girls' basketball, and how to work with problem
parents.
How did you make the decision to leave an
established program at Broughton and take on the challenge of managing
an athletic department that was just starting out?
At the time, I
had been serving as both basketball coach and athletic director for 11
years. Over the years, particularly with the growth of girls' sports,
being an athletic director has become a full-time job. It's tough to do
it in a dual capacity, and I felt like I could do a better job as an
athletic administrator if I wasn't coaching. So I thought this would be
a good opportunity to be an administrator full time, and it was a great
time in my career to try something new.
Broughton is the oldest
school in the county--it opened in 1928. To go from a school with a
50-plus-year tradition and come here and start from scratch has been
really neat. I also knew the principal--he's a former coach and
athletic director--and I felt like he'd be a really good person to work
for, which has certainly turned out to be true. It's been great to see
what we've been able to carve out in 11 years--we've had good kids and
we were fortunate to open hire some quality coaches who came to us with
really good track records.
What do you look for when you're
hiring a coach?
We like to hire coaches who are on our teaching
staff, so the first thing we look for is whether the candidate can fit
into our faculty. I think it's a handicap to have a non-faculty coach,
both for the coach and the kids. If you have a coach who comes in after
school, he's just missed the biggest part of the student-athletes' day.
Beyond that, we look for someone who is going to be dedicated,
because it takes a lot of time to do a good job coaching. An assistant
superintendent told me years ago that he had a line of people outside
his office wanting to coach. You look out there now, and the line is
gone. Coaching has become more and more involved, and sports are now
year-round endeavors. So we really look for someone with the commitment
to do a good job.
Your booster club funds many of the athletic
department's large projects. What are the keys to its success?
Funding is the biggest challenge facing high school athletics right
now. Without the booster club, we certainly couldn't offer what we
offer, because our county does not fund athletics they way some other
places do. They pay our coaches' supplements and they pay the electric
bill and give us about $900 a year. So we rely heavily on gate receipts
and the booster club.
The key has been keeping booster club members
involved and keeping their interest up, whether we're winning or
losing. I believe we've been successful because we started out with
very clear ground rules: The booster club funds major projects, and
they are non-sports-specific. That really got us off on the right foot
as it got more people involved. We don't end up alienating groups or
having people lose interest since, sooner or later, each sport is able
to acquire something because of the booster club.
Every year, my
principal and I generate an athletic wish list and give it to the
booster club. We work together to prioritize it, and they go from
there. They try to knock one thing off at a time, and over time,
they've accomplished a lot of major things. They buy all our vehicles,
and they've purchased scoreboards and public address systems for the
stadium and the baseball and softball fields, and irrigation equipment
for all of our practice fields.
The booster club has a monthly
meeting that I attend, but truthfully, I go and just kind of listen. If
they need some guidance or a push in one direction or another, I try to
do that. But they pretty much control the meeting. We have a board and
we try to get team reps from each sport to be at each meeting.
What fund-raising efforts have been most successful?
The
booster club sells family season passes, which get the whole family
into all of our regular season home events. They keep 40 percent of
that money, and 60 percent goes directly into the athletic department
budget. They also run all of our athletic concessions stands, and they
sell advertising to local businesses that appears on the boards at our
stadium, at the baseball field, and in our gymnasium.
For the past
six years, the booster club has also been very involved with running
our summer camps. We run camps for boys' and girls' basketball,
football, baseball, softball, and soccer, and they do all the
administrative work: the brochures, the paperwork, the rental forms to
use the facilities. They order all the T-shirts, and they have a parent
there the first day to register all the kids who haven't
pre-registered. All our coaches have to do is hire staff and show up
and coach. The coaches and the booster club split the proceeds 50/50,
and that has been a marvelous fund-raiser for us.
How do you
handle scheduling for boys' and girls' basketball?
We've tried just
about everything that you can think of over the years. Before we had
j.v. girls' basketball, we played triple-headers. We'd play j.v. boys,
varsity girls, and varsity boys, in that order, generally on Tuesdays
and Fridays. When we started a j.v. girls' team, we initially scheduled
the j.v. girls and the wrestling team for the same nights. That didn't
work at all. It wasn't fair to the j.v. girls--they didn't feel a part
of a program.
So the next thing we tried was putting the j.v. teams
together. We played j.v. girls and j.v. boys on the same night, and
varsity girls and varsity boys on the same night, with the girls
playing first.
Last year, we split the genders. We played j.v.
girls prior to the varsity girls and j.v. boys prior to the varsity
boys on different nights. There was some opposition to that, so this
year, we have gone back to having j.v. teams together and varsity teams
together. For our varsity teams, on Tuesday nights, the girls are going
to play the last game. On Friday nights, the boys are going to play the
last game.
The j.v. teams also play Tuesday and Friday nights, with
the boys playing the last game on Tuesday night and the first game on
Friday nights. That way, we're hoping our j.v. coaches can get to the
second half of the varsity games and help out on the bench once a week.
What were the objections to splitting the genders?
The
girls didn't think it was fair. They didn't think they'd get the crowds
if they didn't play the same night as the varsity boys. My opinion is
that if you split the genders and do it long enough, sooner or later
the girls are going to have their own crowd. But we have not been able
to sell that in this area up to now. I do think that is probably going
to be the way that everybody goes eventually.
How did your
service on the board of the North Carolina Athletic Directors
Association help shape your career? The first time I went to an annual
meeting was 1976, so I've been involved with them for a long time. I
was on the board for four years before leaving in 1992. I had a great
time--there are a lot of good people involved with the association, and
being around people from different areas of our state gave me some
insight into what other athletic directors are doing.
What
strategies have you developed for working with problem parents?
Parents are certainly more involved now than they were in the past,
and they have more questions. You're a lot more likely to hear, 'Why do
you do it this way?'
At Leesville, we tell all of the parents that
if they have a problem, their first contact needs to be with their
child's coach. If they're not satisfied, then their next step would be
to set up an appointment with me. We also give them guidance on how and
when to approach a coach if they have a problem. We particularly tell
them that coaches are not to be approached after contests--it's too
volatile of a time.
When they do come in, we set very clear
guidelines for what topics we will and will not discuss. We don't talk
about playing time with parents at all. That is an issue that they
often want to talk about, but that is not something we negotiate. My
coaches know they do not have to talk about it and I am not going to
talk about it. And we're not going to talk about another child's
behavior, skills, or playing time with them, either. I'm not going to,
the coaches aren't going to, and neither will the principal.
Prior
to our seasons, we have parent meetings. Our coaches set up a date and
invite the parents in and go over all of these guidelines. Each coach
handles their own meeting. It's worked very well for us.
Your
school has received a sportsmanship award from the NCHSAA the past two
years. How do you as an athletic director foster good sportsmanship?
You can't win every game, but you certainly can exhibit good
sportsmanship at every game, and we try to stress that here. We talk
about it at our initial meeting at the beginning of the year. We also
make sure our coaches attend the state association's rules
interpretation meetings every year, and sportsmanship is stressed
there.
When did you decide to hire an athletic trainer and how
is that position funded?
The county has funded that position since
the early 1980s. In my opinion, my athletic trainer is the most
important person on our staff. She's nationally certified and she also
teaches health and physical education. She teaches a class in sports
medicine as part of her teaching load and she has 15 student aides.
We also have an assistant athletic trainer who is nationally
certified and he is able to give her some time off. They cover all
practices, all home games, and all football games both home and
away.
You recently ran a seminar for parents of college-bound
student-athletes. What did that entail?
We opened it up to parents
of ninth through 12th graders, and we brought in a compliance officer
from NC State, a personal trainer, and a former NC State baseball
player who is now playing professional baseball. His father, who is one
of our assistant baseball coaches, also spoke. It was the first year
we've tried it and it drew 30 parents. I think if we continue the
effort, it will really grow, because it offered quite a bit of
information.
A lot of parents have an interest in their child
receiving a scholarship, and we really want to give them information
about how the process works. So many times, a child gets a letter from
a college and the parents think that's a scholarship offer. The parents
don't understand how the process works and there are a lot of
misunderstandings out there.