Hey High School Coaches.....

quote:

Are Stateside schools generally under the same kind of restrictions during the off-season?

I think most States have some type of no contact rule. At my sons old hs he runs the open gyms on weekends during the Winter and provides low dollar pitching/throwing clinics for those interested before school a couple days a week. Coaches have never been present and its more about conditioning than practice.

we are limited in Indiana no more than two kids at a time I believe. We workout three days a week and then the kids hit on there own two days a week. But we are required to be thereso no kids are left unsupervised. We do not work with our kids but are present.

If I am right, in VA you can't have an organized practice before Feb 20th or something like that. However, my school doesn't have a workout program so you have to workout on your own. When it is football season, it is all about football. Same for basketball and baseball. Before those seasons, your on your own.

Ohio:

I cannot coach a summer team if it has more than 4 players on it from my school. Some of my kids go play travel ball, and the ones who stay here and play must be coached by someone else, EXCEPT that I am allowed 10 days in the summer when I CAN coach them. I generally leave those 10 days open so that if my summer coach needs me to fill in, I can.

During the rest of the year, up till Feb 22, I cannot coach anyone as a team or individually. All we can do is have "Open Gyms" or "Open Fields", which means unstructured "free play"; no direction from me as to what they are supposed to do.

I can also hold conditioning or weight lifting in the off season, which I do. I've always thought that part of conditioning is getting your arm in shape, so after the med balls, agility and tubing, we throw.

But if a kid came to me and said "Coach, I need help with my swing", I CANNOT work with him.

Especially tough since my son is now a Freshman, and I am not allowed to work with him at all during the Winter. Kind of crazy....

I'm not sure what the rules are. But they're easy to get around. For fall ball all the team had to do was not be named after the high school, not use the high school equipment and not be coached by the varsity head coach (he was always on the fence). In the winter they have three afternoons of physical training and a night of hitting. The hitting is done at an academy where the coach is an instructor. The players purchase cheap memberships allowing the coach to work with their hitting as an academy instructor rather than as a coach.

Starting in January there will be two early mornings of throwing mostly for pitchers and catchers. Position players tend to show up for throwing in February. Once again, as long as the head coach isn't in charge it's ok. He watches.

Personally I believe the rules prohibiting offseason work with the coach are silly. The only rules needed are so the coach doesn't overdue the number of workouts. The funny thing is my son has two hitting lessons a week with a rival high school coach and that's perfectly legal.

There are ways to circumvent the restrictions---we got a number of dads together, got the use of the town armory and set up pitching and batting cages---no HS coaches involved--the armory at the designated times was open to anyone who wanted to attend---we, the parents, all of whom were baseball guys and knew the games worked with the kids individually---the armory was always packed with kids from LL to HS---it was a great way for baseball nut Dads to get out of the house during the winter months

I've come to the conclusion that, since our resources are so limited over here as far as options for qualified assistance, our players would be best served if I did NOT coach them the two months of the HS season because then I could coach them for TEN months.
Thankfully, they are letting me continue to work with my own son in the role of 'father'