Elevating Sportsmanship Through Competitive Performance Measures

Character-building has long been a priority of education-based athletics and other activities. There is no better way to establish and enhance character in young and aspiring athletes than through sportsmanship. It provides athletes, coaches and community members the opportunity to showcase their positive aspects in a competitive arena.

The basic principles of sportsmanship have always been central to the mission of the 5A Colorado Springs (Colorado) Metro League (CSML). To create a more uniform approach to fostering greater compliance with this critical concept, the 5A CSML established a set of expectations for all member schools that has greatly improved the effort of their schools and teams. The 5A CSML has implemented an initiative aimed at elevating sportsmanship through a set of competitive performance measures.

Competitive performance measures are chiefly designed to enhance how contests are played between teams in terms of supporting and encouraging positive behaviors among participants, coaches and spectators. This is also done by quickly managing and addressing unruly and unsportsmanlike behaviors.

These performance measures are based on aligned expectations among the member schools, which are mandated by the league bylaws to enforce compliance through streamlined best practices that are equally and consistently enforced by all schools. As a result, spectators, for example, become familiar very quickly with how the league operates and enforces sportsmanship expectations.

In addressing unsportsmanlike behaviors, each school is also required to enforce a minimum one-game automatic suspension for any spectator who exhibits unsportsmanlike behavior during a contest in which the individual had to be removed from the venue. The offender’s athletic administrator also has the discretion to increase the suspension, but the administrator cannot overrule or ignore it. All league athletic directors must uphold all corrective efforts to promote the integrity of the league’s bylaws and to sustain consistency across the league.

The strongest tenet for fostering cooperative sportsmanship, however, is through the post-season coaches’ meetings in which the respective coaches from each school meet to choose all-league selections. Once the selections are completed, the topic of sportsmanship is then discussed and evaluated. The coaches deliberate how sportsmanship was displayed during the season by referring to the league’s written guidelines that are designed to support the best examples they observed during the season. The following points serve as the guidelines for this discussion:

• Were chants or cheers positive?

• Were negative chants or cheers addressed in a timely manner?

• Did game managers respond to requests for help?

• Was a team room ready at a reasonable amount of time prior to the game?

• How did the players and coaches of their opponents interact with officials?

• How did the players and coaches of their opponents interact with their team?

• Were the game workers (timers, scorebook, etc.) responsible and adequately trained?

• Did the school support a special circumstance (i.e., a fundraiser night such as Think Pink, or Senior Night)?

• How did the parents of their opponents interact with officials and your team?

• Were any issues involving parents dealt with quickly?

• Was the school amenable to a schedule change if needed?

As the coaches move through each discussion point, they formally rank each school or team, and they provide written justification for the team that deserves to be crowned the “Sportsmanship Champion” for that season. All votes are confidential, and the presiding athletic director tallies the votes and announces the selection. Only the winner is revealed, so as to keep the process positive, unless an athletic administrator from one of the schools asks where they placed in the rankings.

The data involved drives meaningful conversations with coaches. Stephanie Leasure, Doherty High School athletic director, said “The value of the data for Doherty is in the accountability it brings. I utilize the sportsmanship data in my parent meetings, and we talk about the impact of perception – whether we felt like we had really positive sportsmanship.”

The data can truly motivate a team to do better. The process has shown that teams that may finish last in sportsmanship in one season can turn their behaviors around and move up the rankings very quickly the following season.

The data, however, is only as meaningful to the extent to which athletic directors and coaches use it. League athletic administrators are strongly encouraged to utilize the data as part of the head coaches’ final evaluation. This implementation adds further significance to the overall process and demonstrates how much the school and league prioritizes sportsmanship regarding overall team organization and performance.

By using the sportsmanship data, coaches and athletic directors can discuss why their team placed in a specific order for that season. If a team was voted at the bottom of the league and the key issues were parent behaviors, it can be used as key talking points for coaches and administrators at individual season team and parent meetings. Coaches must be able to speak to these points clearly with parents and involve them in the ownership process of exhibiting positive sportsmanship.

For teams that won the award, recognitions are carried out through various promotions by teams and athletic departments via a traveling trophy, a gym banner, social media posts, and individual team awards among others. Celebrating teams that exhibit exemplary sportsmanship is a cornerstone aspect of the 5A CSML’s unified and collaborative sportsmanship program, and it serves as a key incentive for teams and communities to rally behind.

Programming a league with a cooperative sportsmanship performance approach can and should suit the needs of any league. Contests must be multi-faceted, in which they go above and beyond just traditional winning contests. They also need to consider how games are played, what positive behaviors teams exhibit, how community members respond and interact at games, what perceptions result from everyone’s actions and behavior, and most importantly, what can be learned from a team and community’s sportsmanship efforts that can help them improve.