High school coaches group, Cowboys promote leadership initiative

Author and former NFL player Joe Ehrmann’s workshop, InSideOut Initiative: Coaching Character, drew a crowd of almost 800 at the 84th annual THSCA convention, which ended Wednesday.

THSCA has nearly 21,000 members, and the most recent UIL report said about 2.5 million public-school students participated in 70 activities. And last week Forbes business magazine ranked the Cowboys at $4 billion, No. 1 in the world among pro franchises.

“I’m very proud that the Texas high school coaches, the UIL and the Dallas Cowboys have worked together to create the InSideOut perspective,” UIL executive director Charles Breithaupt said.

Ehrmann contends that too many coaches are held accountable only for wins and losses instead of leading young athletes.

“Sports has always been, up until the last 10 or 15 years, it has always been a metaphor for social change,” Ehrmann said. “You can talk about civil rights, women’s rights, human rights, you think of the role that sports and athletes have played in bringing some of those issues into the mainstream of political consciousness.

“You need to utilize this tool of sports to build a better country and to build better citizens as well.”

InSideOut started in Minnesota and Colorado before coming to Texas, with additional NFL support through the Vikings and Broncos, respectively. The program is expanding to Southern California and Ohio next.

Participants in the workshop begin by answering four fundamental questions: Why do you even coach? Why do we coach the way we do? What does it feel like to be coached by you? How do you define success?

“It’s probably never been more difficult to be a youngster in America than it is today,” Ehrmann said. “With all the academic pressure, the peer pressure, the sexual pressure, all the media, with the events taking place in this country, and then they walk onto your field.

“I think every coach should understand emphatically what the feelings are generated among your players.”

Ehrmann’s InSideOut Initiative next seeks to build a network of Texas-based instructors to expand the program. Also, a workshop is planned for the fall in the Metroplex.

Fort Worth ISD officials welcome such a program.

“We’re teaching them X’s and O’s because we want them to be safe playing a sport,” assistant athletic director Troy Bell said. “But we also need to understand it’s about teaching them life skills.”

“We have an amazing capability to help the world, as well as a responsibility to do it,” Fort Worth assistant AD Lisa Langston said. “I know what interscholastic athletics did for me as a person.”

Numbers, locations

Attendance at this year’s convention, 11,870, was 14.8 percent above last year’s Houston event, but still below the 12,000-plus from 2012 to 2014.

It’s also the second straight year without football or basketball all-star games.

Houston hosts the 2017 event, then it’s back to San Antonio in 2018. The 2019 convention will be in Fort Worth or Austin, THSCA executive director D.W. Rutledge said.

This story was originally published July 20, 2016 at 7:55 PM with the headline "High school coaches group, Cowboys promote leadership initiative."