Transitioning from Middle School to High School Sports

The transition from middle school to high school is already challenging. A 14-year-old student attending a new school, having new teachers, taking tougher classes, and navigating through new social dynamics is a lot to handle. It gets even harder when those student-athletes are competing with 17- and 18-yearolds.

The ways that athletic directors at high schools and middle schools manage these different dynamics and help ease the transition was the topic of a workshop at the 2023 National Athletic Directors Conference in Orlando, Florida, by Mike McGurk and Mike Ellson. McGurk, the athletic director at Lee’s Summit (Missouri) North High School, and Ellson, the former athletic director at Christ Presbyterian School in Nashville, Tennessee, offered that the transition starts with good communication between coaches, parents and student-athletes.

One way to begin this communication pipeline is to look at an athletic department in a different, but familiar way. Athletic directors need to look at their coaches as a team.

“When I stopped being a coach and I became an athletic director, my coaches were now my players. I realized that’s my team. Those are the folks that I create expectations, and then follow up with accountability,” said Ellson, who is now the executive director of the Tennessee Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association. “An athletic director has to love their coaches and support them. You need to establish and build those relationships.”

Ellson said athletic directors set the mentality for a school’s athletic programs. That’s why the connection between the coach and athletic director is so important. When everyone has the same mindset, it becomes easier to know what’s expected. The common language that may be used creates a connection.

This communication pipeline also needs to include coaches of the youth programs and middle school athletic departments. Quality coaches are a vital part of the success of any program, and even more so to the student-athlete.

If a student lives to be 80 years old, a coach will have them for about five percent of the student’s life in some of their most formative years. Oftentimes, according to the workshop speakers, students say, “I quit playing that sport because my middle school coach was not good.”

Without quality coaches in the pipeline, it’s hard to make the program self-sustaining.

Middle school athletics are shaped in a way that caters to everyone. There’s a lot more play time, there’s more of a focus on skill development and skill acquisition, and a brief introduction to some higher-level concepts.

Even though middle school coaches have the athletes for a smaller amount of time, they are still just as vital as any high school coach. It’s important to get them on the same page as the high school program.

“A coach at a middle school level, they’re either going to inspire a student to dream big, or the student is going to have a bad experience and their dreams are going to be crushed,” Ellson said. “You have to make the big time where you are and for those student-athletes in the middle school level, it’s their time.”

One way to do this is to invite middle school coaches to high school practices and have them bring their teams. Middle school coaches will see the culture that the high school program is creating and bring that into their own coaching. The players will also be exposed to higher level talent and concepts that will help them develop.

“We’re not seeing success unless a high school coach takes a sincere interest in the middle school program,” Ellson said. “They show up and participate in practices. They philosophically design and then lead the middle school coach to run drills. The language that those young students can expect when they transition from high school helps them to prepare and eases the transition for them to high school. It’s intimidating when you’re going from middle school to high school, and we want the transition to go as smoothly as possible.”

This can also help create the relationship between coaches that is important. Discussions can begin between the coaches to help create a vision for the program that both coaches agree with and help maximize their players’ potential. Proper communication and education are vital in the process of building a successful sports program.

“They [coaching staff] were already meeting a lot together – watching game film, sharing practice notes, and it made a big difference,” Ellson said. “They were able to genuinely care for each other. And as the student-athletes see the coaches care for each other, they’re going to model what they see.”

The need for education and communication extends down to parents, too, the speakers noted. Middle school athletics are set up much differently than high school athletics. High school athletics are more focused on getting results and more out-of-season commitment, and parents might not quite fully understand the transition themselves.

Parent meetings in the summer can be an extremely useful resource for both coaches and athletic directors. Parents can meet the coaches of the sports their children might be interested in playing, they can meet athletic trainers and other people who may be involved in athletics, and coaches can lay out their philosophies and their own expectations.

Again, the speakers noted, it just comes down to getting everyone vertically aligned with language, ideas and goals for the program. Programs are able to create a culture that allows the student-athletes to become the best version of themselves, and flourish in all the new changes they experience as they move into high school.

“Really, that’s where the trickle-down effect occurs in coaching high school and middle school students,” Ellson said. “At the end of the day, if you have a positive culture, legacy naturally starts flowing. We see this, we want to emulate it. We want to keep this tradition going. And it’s beyond the scoreboards and beyond the banner.”