LEADERSHIP istrative members took care of the upfront wording, so they were involved in that way,” he says. “Everyone on the committee read the draft and made corrections and recommendations before we submitted our final proposal to the superintendent.”
approach is not to stop practices—it’s to alter them so they’re safe. So we have a flag system based on the heat index: Green means we’re good to go, yellow and red mean alterations will be implemented, and we don’t cancel practice until we hit black. Coaches and ath-
“You can’t simply say that when the temperature is 95 degrees or the humidity is above 80 percent, there will not be practice,” Lunt says. “We’d never have practice down here if that were the rule.” The St. Tammany committee met in person five times, and sent e-mails back and forth over the three months the group worked on the project. “It really came together pretty quickly,” Karlin says. “We didn’t try to reinvent the wheel—we pulled from policies already in place in other states and just kind of adapted them to our own environment. “For instance, some of the policies we looked at used a specific heat index reading to determine when to cancel practice,” Karlin continues. “But our
letes find a scale much more fair than a straight cutoff.” Perhaps the toughest group to win over is the coaches. While there are now fewer “old school” types who believe any accommodation for weather is a sign of weakness, coaches face conflicting interests that they can’t ignore. “Coaches are torn,” says Jeff Hopp, LAT, ATC, Head Athletic Trainer at Marietta (Ga.) High School. “There is pressure on them to win and have a successful program, but hopefully they
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have their athletes’ best interests at heart, too. In order to have your policy followed, you will need them to understand why it’s there in the first place.” Karlin found out quickly that coaches were a concern for the St. Tammany group. “I was surprised how worried some committee members were about potential backlash from coaches,” he says. “They thought that making these rules might cause problems. This is SEC country—high school football is big, and any restrictions put on our kids are viewed with suspicion. We really highlighted to the coaches and committee members that we were not trying to prevent practice, but protect practice.” Educating the sport coaches about the policy—before it was implemented—was at the top of Stinson’s list as he formed his school district’s policy last year. “Coaches can get a little apprehensive when you start messing with their practice times,” he says. “So I told them, ‘These procedures are not designed to make your players less successful. In fact, they’re designed to make them work even more efficiently.’” The last key group that must take