LEAD1 Association Releases Sport Supervision Guide for Athletics Departments
Tom McMillen
The LEAD1 Association, which represents the athletics directors of the 130 member schools of the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), released a guide to assist members with key considerations for effective sport supervision, including fostering positive student-athlete experiences, ensuring safety and risk management, and understanding administrative expectations. The LEAD1 Guide to Sport Supervision, an instructional manual for leadership skills and supervision training, includes practical approaches institutions may consider discussing and implementing.
“Sport supervisors play a significant role in the health and safety of student-athletes and overall higher education experience,” said Tom McMillen, President and CEO of the LEAD1 Association. “We created this guide to help our athletics departments with staff engagement by minimizing any ambiguity which may exist for sport supervisors and other levels of the organization. The guide will help our ADs formalize what sport supervision is and how they may want to structure the role on their respective campuses.”
The Association held a webinar on Wednesday, June 5 to discuss ways to enhance sport supervision. The webinar included an institutional best practice model to help underscore the importance of structured training, meeting, monitoring, and problem-solving.
The webinar presenters included Ceal Barry, Deputy Athletics Director and former head women’s basketball coach, University of Colorado; John Currie, Athletics Director, Wake Forest University; and Lori Ebihara, consultant.
The presenters discussed the proactive role of a sport supervisor, what it means to be a first-level supervisor, the athletics director’s perspective on traits and expectations that come with being a sport supervisor, head coach supervisory needs, risk mitigation, and institutional models to sport supervision.
The LEAD1 Guide to Sport Supervision may be accessed here: http://bit.ly/SportSupervision
Following the release of the guide, LEAD1 will form a task force and create a toolkit which will include industry best practices and standard operating procedures.