The Athletic Director Career Path

Personal Summary

I used Scott Christs’ 7 Powerful Questions To Find What You Out Want To Do With Your Life to help me figure out what I am passionate about, my role models, and my goals in life. Out of high school I did not know what I wanted to do. My parents gave me the choice of either start working or going to college. I chose college even though I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life and to some extent I still don’t. I chose sports management as my major. I went into the sports management major because I grew up playing sports and enjoying sports. Once I chose sports management I did not really know what I still wanted to do, but the one area that seemed interesting to me was being an athletic director. This comes from my passion for sports and enjoying being outdoors. I also picked this field because everyone I have looked up to in my life for the most part has had connections to sports. Whether it was my dad who was a coach to me for most of my life or guys like Chase Utley or Ryan Howard who were my role models growing up, I wanted to be just like them. So since I always saw life through sports, I chose sports management. My goals in life are to find a good job, have a family, and to be happy. Athletic directing I believe is a good job for me because it not only connects my passion for sports, but also allows me to be with my family. Unlike other careers down the sports management path, like being a part of a major sports franchise, which could require a lot of moving around, being an athletic director I could stay in one school district for a while and not need to move around. With a sports background I know that it takes hard work to get to where you want to be so I know that I can put in work necessary to be put in a career I want to be in. That is why I believe I can become an athletic director, and in order to find the most recent information I consulted the Occupational Outlook Handbook. 

Career Summary

The career path I chose is athletic director but the Occupational Outlook Handbook doesn’t have that. It directed me to a postsecondary education administrator. But I feel that athletic directing is a hybrid of an administrator and a coach so I will be using the coaching information from the Occupational Outlook Handbook. Coaches are in charge of teaching amateur and professional athletes the skills they need to succeed at their sport. Coaches get paid about $33,780 a year. Coaches can work irregular hours like evening, weekends, and holidays. To become a coach it is expected to have some degree of experience in the sport being coached. The best way to gain knowledge of the sport is through gaining experience for coaching.

There are many duties a coach has to do. They are to plan and run practices, game plan for upcoming games, work with athletes on their strengths and weaknesses, being able to motivate the team. They do all of these duties to refine the players to make them the best athletes they can be. Those are some duties that a coach does throughout a day or season. 

The work environment may depend on the level being coached. If there is a high school coach normally practices are run after school dismisses for the day and occasionally on weekends. In a collegiate sports program it may be different. There might be a workout before classes start for the day then a practice at night. There will also be practices on weekends in collegiate sports as well on holiday breaks. And with a lot of sports the environment itself plays a major role in the ability to practice because of things like rain and snow.

To become a coach there are different requirements. For high school a college degree won't always be necessary, but at a college it is more likely that a person will need a college degree in the sports field. Playing the sport at some point is also a requirement for a coaching job. Certification in different areas is also looked at for coaches. This is from small education courses, CPR, background checks, and other similar things. To learn more about coaching and athletic directing I interviewed my high school athletic director.

Interview Questions 

The person I interviewed is Bryan Geist. He is the athletic director at my high school, Northern Lehigh. As well as being the athletic director for the high school he is also the president of the Colonial League which is the league our high school athletics play in. Mr. Geist has been the athletic director at Northern Lehigh since 2006 and has been in charge of many successful athletic teams during his time here. Across the numerous sports Northern Lehigh participates in he has been in charge of eight Colonial League championships teams, five District XI championship teams, and eleven teams that qualified for state playoffs, as well as many more successful individual sport participants at the district and state level from wrestling and track and field. So he was a person I thought would be a good person to talk to about the athletic director career. 

There are different ways to get into the athletic director career. One way is by doing what I am doing and being a sports management major and getting a job in an athletic field of work then getting a job as an assistant or a coach then applying to be an athletic director. The other common way is that a high school will choose either a teacher or a coach to become the schools athletic director. Mr. Geist was a high school math teacher first and wanted to coach some of the high school sports. When he started coaching it sparked his interest in becoming more than just a teacher and a coach but the schools athletic director. 

There are many duties that Mr. Geist has to do throughout the day as both an athletic director. To start the week he checks the athletics schedules for the day and week. Some of the things he does while working on the athletic schedule is scheduling transportation for teams that play away games during the week, as well as getting game help which could be things like getting people to work concessions, tickets, the scoreboard, and announcing the game. He also checks to make sure there are officials scheduled for the games played during the week as well as paying them for their work. Since Mr. Geist is also our league president, he also has other duties. He has to update the league websites for final scores and standings as well as playoff brackets. He also approves of facility requests, which are like choosing neutral site fields to play playoff games on. And as an athletic director he would have say in changes to his school's sporting facilities. These are just some of the duties that an athletic director does during his work day and week. 

He also told me about current events and major issues in the field. Some of the current events he sees in the field are concussion management, coaching education, and budget restraints. Concussion management is a topic that is looked at at all levels of sport. But coaching education and budget restraints I feel affect high school athletic directors more than college or professionally run sports organizations. This is because almost anyone could be a high school coach so as an athletic director you want to make sure the people you hire as coaches not only know the game they are coaching and how to handle the game. But also able to handle teenagers and keep them in the right mindset to not only focus on sports but to also stay up on their school work. Budget restraints are a problem in most aspects of schools, especially in smaller schools. Not only are school budgets for sports not always a lot but they have to split that budget up between the sport teams so if a school supports twelve different sports it is difficult to decide how much each sport gets. That is why each team will do fundraisers so it is easier to budget around the sports teams. Mr. Geist then said that one of the biggest issues, for athletic directors in Pennsylvania, is leveling the playing field between public schools and private or charter schools. While it is illegal to recruit for schools to recruit high school students for sports private and charter schools kind of find a loophole in it. Since a large number of the private or charter schools are catholic or religion related schools the schools can send letters in the mail to students to come to learn at their schools, because they are private and they can give a better education and also study religion. So some coaches will have these letters sent to students that attend public schools that are very good at their sport and try to persuade them to come play for them. A lot of students then go to these schools to play sports and they pretty much build super teams from all around the area. This is a problem because the public schools lose talented players to these private schools and as teams advance in the Pennsylvania state playoffs for sports they have to play these private schools with super teams of players from all around the area. A big one from where I am from in Bethlehem Catholic they have players from all over eastern Pennsylvania and they have built dynasties in football and wrestling because of this. Every year they are a top team in the state in these sports and public schools cannot compete with them. These are some of the issues and events that athletic directors are facing right now, and I went into researching other current event topics in athletic directing.

Current Event 

The field of athletic directing does not have any real major current issue. But one issue that comes up a lot when dealing with high school athletics is the use of steroids or other performance enhancers. People will joke all the time about when they see a bigger, stronger, and faster kid in high school and say that the kid is on steroids because they just seem bigger or better at the sport. When I was younger and even in the early years of high school I would have never thought kids like me that are my age would be using steroids or performance enhancers because we were always told they were bad and only cheaters use them. This is because growing up we saw people like Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez and wanted to be as strong as them. Then when it came out they used or are speculated to have used steroids it became smudge on their careers. They were still seen as heroes because of how good they were but they might have cheated to get to be that good. As you get older and get to know people you competed against better, and even start to become friends with the people from other schools you may have faced, you learn that some of these kids did use things that enhance their performance. Even though the use of steroids is nowhere near as prominent in sports in general today it still affects sports even down to the high school level. So I looked up an article to learn more about the use of steroids in high school athletics. 

The article I looked up is from the website the recovery village and it is about the use of steroids in high school athletics. The use of steroids tends to be for many different reasons and a lot of them come from everyday pressures. The main reason for the use of steroids is to get stronger. Some high school athletes think that they could use athletics to get into college so they use them so become stronger to get more college looks and possibly scholarships. Some might use it as a popularity thing. That if they use enhancement to get stronger they might not only look bigger and stronger but they will get more playing time say in a football game and as a result more people see them and they feel more popular. One issue that is common in high school for both boys and girls is body image, some kids use steroids to help them physically look better. Like I said before professional athletes also have a bit of an influence here because there are players that use them that kids looked up to and kids will say, “If he is using them I should too, so I can be just like him.” This makes many different reasons why a high school athlete would choose to use steroids. 

Now this is not as much a major issue as it could be but it still is not something people especially high school students should be using. In the article it says that a prominent steroid researcher and sports psychologist studies and found that up to twelve percent of the males they studied said they have admitted to using steroids at some point in their lives, and about two percent of the girls they studied. However the number seems like a low percentage it does not say how many people they surveyed so that twelve percent could be large, and that is only the amount of students that have admitted to using them some might have but have not admitted to it. Students feel they can probably get away with it because in non professional level sports there is little to no testing done for drugs. The article says that only about twenty percent of U.S. high schools test their players for performance enhancers. If it became a mandatory thing for high schools to test their student athletes then there would definitely be a lowered number of users of performance enhancers.

There are many reasons why high school students should not be using steroids. To start it is they are drugs and can become very addictive. Also during high school students' bodies are already going through major changes they should not be adding another drug that can change their hormones and growth levels into their systems. It discredits the student and sport by trying to make it okay to cheat and illegally become better than their competition. These are just a few reasons on why steroids should not be used by high school student athletes. 

This article I found pretty informative and learned a couple things from it. To start with when I was younger I would have never thought high schoolers would actually use steroids. Growing we were always told never to cheat the game you play and using steroids is a form of cheating. But as I got older I started to realize some kids used them and I lost a little bit of respect for those people. From the article I learned that people might not just use them to just better than their competition, but also to gain popularity. I still would like to learn more about how many student athletes use them as well as some of the regulations the schools use to prevent the use of them. 

Robert Schaeffer