New Athletic Director Orientation (2025)

For a full TSSAA Portal introduction, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcNyvmhZGZ0

All right, we’ll go ahead and crank things up. Uh, couple of minutes late, so I apologize for that. We’ll be respectful of everybody’s time. Appreciate appreciate all of you who taking the time to be here. So, without further ado, I’m going to turn it over to Mr. Mike Yelson. Mark, thank you so much. and we are um we’re honored to be included with the TWSAA uh count their partnership as a as a dear friendship for what we’re trying to do for all of you as athletic administrators. And I’m um I have a mentor, his name is Don Bales, have several mentors, but I was speaking with Don this morning and he just reminded me, he’s like, you know, remind everybody this is fun. Um, so we want to smile and I know you’re getting ready to have a lot of information thrown at you, but have joy in your journey. I think that’s really important because what’s the number one reason kids play sports according to NFHS? To have fun. So, we want to have fun as well. U make sure we’re doing our job. So, kudos to y’all for making the drive to be here today. And, uh, Greg Wyatt, he’s our new president of the TIAA. he and I are going to trade off on slides and I’m gonna let Greg go ahead and take this with the uh the membership. Yeah, thanks Mike. Uh I want to kind of go on what Mike said a little bit there and that u uh it’s really great to see people that I’ve coached against, coached with, people that recruited me, uh recruited our school. Uh it’s really neat to see where you guys have gone in your in your athletic journeys. uh new people that are coming in. Uh this is a great job. It’s not an easy job, but it’s a great job if you if you if you make it that. Um I know this that uh if you become a TIAA member, these are the these are all the benefits that you get. Uh you get a quarterly newsletter which is full of all types of information uh to help you in your schools. There’s a $25 uh state athletic director’s conference discount. There’s uh it’s a $45 uh LTI course discount. If you have not taken any of the LTI or LTC courses, I would highly encourage you to get in there. One, you can get u uh you can get inservice credit for it. And two, um the first three, which is 501, 502, and 503 will help you tremendously in what you do. It will really make you look at your job in a different way. um as an old football coach who got named athletic director the way that that it’s always been in our state for a long time. You know, hey, you’re the head football coach, you’re going to be the athletic director, too. And you really didn’t do much. You take 501, 502, and 503, and you figure out your names on the line, it changes the way that you look at your school, and it changes the way that you look at how you do your job. And if you’ve been through those, you know what I’m talking about. and I would highly encourage you to get involved in those. Uh you have an opportunity to nominate students from your school for a national scholarship. Uh it goes through the TIAA then it goes to the uh the section we are in section three which is the southeast basically and then on to uh the national uh you have opportunity to um uh quarter profession a quarterly professional journal uh written by and for athletic administrators which is really neat if you don’t get that magazine it’s really neat one uh I get a lot of ideas out of that some things I steal from it you know as an old football coach you know We we never really invent. We always just steal things from people. Um so, uh you get discount on registration fees to the national ad conference. If you’ve never been to that national ad conference, it’s in Tampa this year. If your school can afford to get you there, look, they send English teachers all over the country to go learn English. But I ain’t never heard of an English teacher get sued because of what happened in the classroom. but your butt’s going to get sued in a heartbeat. Go find best practices. And the best way to do that is get into a national conference and learn from people from across the country that are doing things differently that you might be able to get into. So, I highly encourage you if you get a chance to do that. My first one was in Denver about four years ago. I was lost as last year’s Easter eggs. I couldn’t find my way around. I didn’t know where to what was going on. And Mike was good enough. He got he got me there to to show me the way. Once I started to get involved in it, man, just the the I tal I was on the phone the other day with AD from New York and an AD from Las Vegas and we’re sharing ideas about things. That’s that’s the type of power that you get in when you get into these things. If you’ve ever been in a coaches association, you understand that. You understand the meaning of being able to go out and and uh talk to other people and share ideas. uh you get opportunities to ser on serve on national committees. Uh you know, you can you can go teach at the national level. I’ve been doing it for two years now. It’s one of the greatest things I’ve ever done. I get to go teach at the national conference. There’s a course that I teach there. Uh I get to meet people. Um it’s incredible. Uh opportunity for uh national recognition through NITAA awards. You get a $2 million student injury property damage liability insurance. That’s one of the biggest things right there. Okay, something happens on the field, something happens uh at school, you’ve got a liability insurance right there. And there’s $2,500 term life and ability to purchase term life. Um healthc care is where as well as uh discounts on cancer insurance and accidental insurance and things like that. Um membership in the TIAA brings with it more benefits than ever before and we’re always looking for things that we can do to make your job easier. uh continued education opportunities. Uh that’s one of my things that I that I really have a problem with in our state and especially in our county, Ruxford County. I’ll go out and say it right now. We educate teachers all the time. But we don’t educate athletic administrators the way that we should. And you have an interest in it or you wouldn’t be here. So my I highly encourage you to try to get involved in in something like this to make yourself better, to make your school better, to make your community better. Uh it’s just a great way to go, Mike. All right. Then we’re dual members. You can see on that bottom in red. And so on your TWSA portal page, if you haven’t already done so, make sure you check your box and and sign up. And then again, when you do that, you’re a member of Tennessee and the National Association. Everybody knows you can get a membership through the good. All right. So, um we annually ask permission or or put submit a grant request to the NITAA um and it’ll be voted on uh this week by the NITAA board in Indianapolis. We’ll know uh late next week if we get approval, but we seek out a grant and in person on Monday, September 29th. We’re doing it probably somewhere around Jackson, Tennessee. Uh we’re going to have we’re going to teach 501 in the morning, 502 in the afternoon. When you finish those courses, we’ll submit your information to the national office, and then it typically takes four or five weeks, and then they’ll send you a link to 503. Well, if you sign up for a webinar, which we’ve got a slide, those $125 a piece, you’re going to get each of those courses for free. And once you finish those three courses, you can become a registered athletic administrator. And there’s a booklet that we brought. Uh it’s almost outdated. We’ll get a new booklet in September. But on pages 20 and 21, it it walks you through u the levels of certification. And we’ve also got a couple of road maps that we’re going to show you. And then any of you can call or email us at any time, and we’re happy to walk through that with you. Patrick Miller is our state coordinator uh for the state of Tennessee. So again, this is an awesome opportunity. It’s how Greg found out and in Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee back what 2019 or 2020 is when he was first introduced to this and he took the initiative to go be a lifelong learner as an athletic director. And that’s our encouragement to you. There are 59 4hour leadership training courses. Greg, quickly on the on the webinar opportunity. Yeah, these are a list of the webinars and the dates that they are. Um, it’s pretty neat. They’re all on Zoom. You get to take them. They’re usually in the evenings. Uh, they last about, you know, three and a half to four hours. Uh, uh, great way to go learn. Um, these are the ones that are going to be offered the rest of July and into August. Uh, you can go to the NITAA site and you can sign up for them. They’re 125 each, I believe. Uh and it’s a great opportunity to and there’s so many different uh subjects. Uh event management, I tell you there’s two event management ones and both of them are excellent. You want to figure out where your liability lies in a football game that we that you’re having. Go take event management and you will walk into a Friday night and you will see things completely different than you do right now. I promise you. Uh there there are some great opportunities to be able to, you know, recruit, hire and monitor and retain coaches. That’s what we’re all trying to do. We can’t find coaches nowadays. It’s hard to find them and then it’s hard to keep them when you get them. So there there’s ways to do those types of things there. Thank you, Greg. All right, Greg already mentioned the national conference. Here’s the dates. And I’m guessing this slide deck will be sent to everyone. So you’ll have that. You can start registering for the national conference here in a week or two. So, uh, be on the lookout for that information. I want to tell you this. If you are interested in going and you think you’re going to go, you better go hook book your hotel room immediately because there’ll be 2500 people there. It’ll be packed. Okay. Our state conference, our 35th, a gentleman named Richard Carroll, who was a longtime athletic administrator at Sullivan North High School, was also the principal in East Tennessee, uh, was a dear friend and mentor for me. And um every time this slide pops up, I think about him and actually chill about his impact not only on me but on so many others. And that’s what Greg was speaking about about the friendships and calling New York and Nevada and everywhere else just you know cultivating uh your network and this gives you a great opportunity and we’re growing. We’re excited about our growth but we still have a long way to go. So, we hope you can make that a priority to go to Knoxville, even if you can just come for a day or two uh just to learn and grow and meet the people in our state. Real quick story about just being able to connect with people across the state. Uh Barry Way, Frankie, you know Barry very well. Barry’s as good as they come. Barry’s down here at Spring Fling and his baseball team has got a day off and they’re traveling up uh to Nashville to go to Opry Mills. their bus breaks down on the side of the road. He ain’t got he don’t know what to do. You know what I’m saying? Barry calls me. I take I I call one of our bus drivers. I send the bus to go pick his kids up. Well, I know now if I’m ever stuck in East Tennessee, I’m calling Barry. Barry owes me one. Number one. You know what I’m saying? But, uh that’s the type of relationships that you get into. We’re all about helping our kids and each other. I I know I know we have we have great rivalries, man. There’s some there’s some really been rivalries across our state, but when it comes right down to it, it’s about being better for your school and being better for your kids. All right. So, want to pay special attention on your right hand column, fourth person up from the bottom, Mark Reeves. Mark Reeves and Joe Blair have become certified athletic administrators. very very few states across the nation have their leaders be willing to go and pursue certification. They get in the trenches with us. They’re trying to understand and continue to grow of what your job entails. And I think it speaks volumes. So much so that the assistant executive director of the NIAA Rich Barton and the board president Steve Thrron did a workshop at the NFHS in Chicago uh last week and they brought up Mark as um one of the leaders that’s willing to grow and learn. So you can see here the list uh I don’t know if you all know third uh on the right Dan Schlafer there’s a retired but or note there. The last thing Dan Schlaer is is retired. And we think the uh Ask the NIA, Dan is 73. And we think he’s the oldest person to ever become certified. So again, you’ve got leaders in your state that take this seriously. And there’s a list of the folks and it’s growing. And when I started back, you know, years ago, we had two or three people get certified. So all right. So here are the road maps to certification. And this was created in his mind. Patrick Miller and then Chris Parker of Dyer Countyy’s the athletic director. He designed these for us. And I think it really sets out a great template of simplicity of okay, here’s what you need to do to get your CAA. Once you get your CAA, you can then get your CMAA and you’ll get a copy of this. Um, so again, want to give those guys a shout out. They’re both on our board. When you first look at it, guys, it can be a little daunting. I I will tell you this, the NIA website, sometimes it’s a little hard to navigate and find out where you want to do. This is a great this is a great piece of material right here to show you a stepby-step process. If you go take 501, 502, and 503 in September, you’re you’re over halfway there to get to be CIA certified certified athletic register. You can scan this QR code and it’ll take you to the 14 legal duties of a coach and an athletic director. Every call I’m on with NITAA talk as a board. We tell everybody when you have your coaches meeting to start your year, you got to show your coaches these 14 legal duties of a coach, but also as the leader, an athletic director, hey, I have to abide by these rules as well. And duty to plan, duty to supervise, you know, all the different um duties that are there, you want to pay special attention to. So, uh, that QR code will take you to that. Greg, any thought when you first took 504 504? Oh, yeah. I walk into coaches meetings and I tell them horror stories because I don’t want them to repeat what other people across the nation have done. Uh, there were a couple coaches in Georgia a couple years ago that ignored the heat index real, took a girls basketball team out into the bleachers, ran them. One of one of the a 15-year-old girl died. Those those two coaches went up for manslaughter charges because they ignored the the heat index rule. Now you think it can’t happen in your school. Well, you think that AD thought there’s no way that’s going to happen in my school. It’ll happen in your school if you don’t if you don’t beat this thing into your coaches. So, these are things that you really need to understand and and really get across to your coaches every meeting that you get a chance. Again, don’t let it discourage you. let it, you know, be a positive and that you’re informed. All right, here’s a compliance checklist that you’ll be able to see. NFHHS learn Tennessee Safe Stars that Dr. Diamond uh worked with Mark and Joe to create and you can see here what your parents need, your coaches. So, you’ll have access to that compliance checklist. Uh if you’re interested in um connecting and listen, I don’t know why we seem to have a stigma about well, I don’t I’m not a mentee. I don’t need to be mentored. Well, I’ll bet I’ve got 10 people I could call right now that I would say, “You’re my mentor. I need you. I need advice.” And I was an AD for 33 years, and I still am trying to figure all this out. So, if you are interested in getting into our mentor program, there’s Michelle’s uh email. You can send her an email. Again, you’ll have this slide. Just want to speak to the value and importance of being a lifelong learner. All right. We have corporate partners. You can see this later. Um, you know, all all all around everybody’s, you know, very um what what we try to do with our corporate partners is find companies that give us tools to make us more efficient as an athletic administrator. And then here’s our board of directors. So, you can kind of see from a general perspective of who’s responsible for different sections of our board. Again, mentioned Greg as our our new president. Um, and then we have regional directors. Uh, region one right now, Frankie and East Tennessee, we don’t have any ones. So, if we get people coming to the state conference and stuff, we we need your involvement, representation across this state. So, anyway, we want you to see our board members. And then that’s our tagline, enhance, equip, and excel. We want to enhance what you do as an athletic administrator. And those booklets that you have, feel free to grab another one and take it to your principal or superintendent because they don’t really know. You do so much in the unseen. They don’t really know uh what an athletic administrator does. So, we know an AD is not going to pat themselves on the back, but it’s okay to go tell your story to your principal. and those booklets. Wow. 59 4-hour courses I’m responsible for as an AD, you know, you know, preach that to your to your uh leadership so that they get it. Greg, any final thoughts? And we’ll turn it over to Joe in here. Assistant principles, you guys know you can get Tassel credits for taking these classes. There there are certain classes that you can take that you can get tassel credit for. I know uh Jason’s been involved and and done a few. Dos, have you taken any? Jump in there. you get some tassel credit for it and stuff like that, you know. So, I mean, if you’re looking for hours, there’s four hours. You could get eight at the conference, you know, pretty easily. So, just letting you guys know. Mark, uh, Joe, H, appreciate you guys letting us step in. Uh, I will say this, if you’re new to being an athletic director, don’t hesitate to call these guys. When I first started, man, it’s like, man, I don’t want to call those guys and bug them. I don’t want, you know what I’m saying? And they always call back. If they don’t answer, they always call back and they’re always great about answering your questions. Look, there are times I call them and they don’t know what the rule is. They got to go look it up. They’re just like us. I promise you that, okay? We’re all trying to figure out how to navigate this thing, but they are always open. And I am so appreciative to Joe and Mark because I I bugged the crap out of them throughout the year, them and and uh and I appreciate you guys. Thanks. Well, we work for you all. We work for the association, the schools, the state of Tennessee. Um, I mean, our bosses are important control technically, but we work for you. So, like Greg said, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. Um, and if you got questions, we want to make sure we steer help you steer your programs in the right direction. Uh, because we know you’re dealing with a lot. Um, so we want to make sure we’re we’re gonna Are there times we have to talk to you about something that’s not nice to talk about? Yeah, there is. Uh but but we we want to make sure that we’re helping you all uh have your athletic department be in a place where those conversations when when they do happen they’re not as bad of a conversation and hopefully if you do things right you avoid those conversations but uh one other thing that and we love the partnership with TIAA and also attack which I’m going to talk about here in a second as well. Uh that’s a great we we feel like uh there’s a lot of states states in the not I say a lot there’s some states in the country they don’t have this type of a partnership with their uh athletic administrator association and their coaches association we do because we feel it’s valuable we feel it’s important uh we get a lot of help from them a lot of good feedback from them to help us guide some of the decisions that we have to make and so we want to make sure we’re working with them as much as we possibly can uh to help you all and to be as big of a resource for you all as possible we can uh one thing that we’re starting up with TIAA is uh we’re going to be partnering with them on doing some monthly podcasts uh starting up in in August and and try to have one each month. We’ll have some uh special guests on. We got different topics that we’re going to be putting out there. Uh we’re going to try to gear it towards basically what’s going on that time of year is what’s important, what what’s on everybody’s minds. Uh but we’re going to have those created once a month. We’ll get them uh posted and you and share with you all. uh use those as much as you want. Um and we try to keep them as limited a time as possible about 40 30 45 minutes short and quick. Uh but we want we’re looking forward to that that as well with TIA 8 and and working with them on that. Uh like I said, we also do a lot with TAC. Uh I would encourage you I know one thing when I was an AD uh our principal felt this was really important uh and he to the point where he dedicated money to it. So anytime a principal does that, we know he thinks it’s important. Uh but he he paid for uh all of our head coaches to have memberships in TAC and then he encouraged the head coaches if you have assistance and your fundraising uh funds that you have, pay for your assistance to have memberships in TAC as well, primarily for the coverage that comes along with it. It comes with a with a liability insurance coverage of $2 million. Uh and that’s going to help cover your coaches. Uh but also Taka does a lot just to h act as a voice for coaches as well. Uh just like uh Mike uh is a is a member is an exofficial member on our board and legislative council for TIAA. TAC also has exofficial memberships as well on our board and council. They have a voice for coaches as well. Uh they’re they’re working to uh do what they can uh to help coaches as much as possible. Uh they’re also we’re also partnering with them to help create some resources for coaches as well. Uh training for coaches for things like how do you properly do a parent meeting? Um you know, how do you work on structuring a budget for your athletic program for those new coaches? Because more and more what we’re seeing is there’s a lot of coaches now and that number going to keep growing that are non-faculty. That means they’re not school people. That means they don’t understand how the school world works. uh which if you’re in education, you know, that’s a whole different dynamic. Uh and people that are outside of education, they come in, they don’t understand why can’t I just why why do I have to fill out what is a PO? Like like how does that even work? I usually just get a get a reimbursement. I don’t have to get permission ahead of time, you know, things like that. Um and we’re seeing more and more coaches that are that are not school people. Uh, so we’re working with TAC to help create some resources as well to help your coaches know how to better coach to help you not get in trouble and help them not get in trouble as well and help their programs work well. Uh, so we’re looking forward to working with them uh throughout the year as well. So the Russ’s information, Russ Plumbers is one of the main people with TAC that we work with a good bit. Reach out to Russ anytime you got any questions about TAC and what they can offer for you all. Okay, we’re going to get into uh kind of the the the the nitty-gritty of what we’re dealing with overall with this uh with this training from our standpoint, from TW estabate standpoint. And feel free to stop anytime you got questions about anything. Um, one of the things I want to get into first of all is just a quick overall summary of our website. And there’s a lot on our website. Uh, if you ever spent any time on there trying to find something, there’s a lot there to surf through. Uh, so hopefully I’m going to try to navigate it in a way so that it’s more streamlined for you all as an athletic director when it comes to trying to figure out what you need to find uh on our website. So tws.org is our main web page. I’m going to jump over there real quick uh and kind of play around here. Once you get to this main page, uh you’ll see some tabs along the top here. The one that’s probably going to be your home base as an athletic director is this athletic administrators page. You click on that tab and it’s going to take you to this athletic administrator’s page. And what we try to do here is put as much resources on here and quick links on here for you all. As the year is going on, you got to find something quick. Here’s where you go here. Here’s where to look it up. Um, we’ve got postseason information on here. if you’re hosting a postseason competition, uh if you have questions about NFHS, uh network for postseason competition, media regulations, uh state championship participation certificates, we’ll talk about those a little bit more later on. Uh that’s all here. Um under membership essentials, how to become a member. Obviously, everybody here’s already pretty much a member. Uh but access a quick link to the TWSA portal, which is where you’re going to spend a lot of your time as well. That’s where you’re doing all of your eligibility. Uh if you have it set up so that you’re the person doing the eligibility, if you have someone else doing that, uh if your coaches are doing their own eligibility, however that’s structured, there’s a quick link uh to the portal as well. Uploading schedules uh to the portal. Uh that so that’s a quick link for that. Uh approved co-ops. If you’re wondering about establishing a co-op with another school or if you’re wondering if a school is co-oping with someone else, you can check there. Uh the big one right here for you all uh is a compliance checklist. And what this compliance checklist is, it’s a PowerPoint that we have staged on here. And basically, it’s a monthby-month breakdown of what you as an athletic director need to be looking at for that time of year, for that particular month. So, we’re in July right now. We’re getting ready to open up our portal for membership to get your all your sports activated, all your coaches entered, uh, your fall sports, getting them ready to to be processed for eligibility. Um, so that’s kind of your focus on for the month of July. And then you can kind of look in and there’s a lot in July because it’s the beginning of the year. Everybody’s getting ready to go. Everybody’s woken up from the dead period. So everybody’s getting ready to get active. Uh, and then August and September. So month by month, it kind of walks you through what you need to be looking at. So it helps you kind of give give yourself a little bit of a of a of a of a thing, a mindset looking forward to. Okay, next month’s August, what do I need to be starting starting to prep for? Uh then we have some additional information at the end of this. One thing that’s on here is who to contact in our office. If you had a question about a certain thing, uh so these are the people and this is going to be updated a little bit uh with EJ coming on board. uh we’ll go through and update uh some of his responsibilities as well, but people in our office to reach out to if you have specific questions about certain things. And again, don’t hesitate to reach out uh to us about anything. Uh quick links to the sports calendar. Uh for individual sports, uh what can a certain sport be doing on a particular time of the year? Get you quick links to there. Eligibility, quick links to competition or to to our our eligibility, coaches education. So, a lot of different things on there that’s beneficial uh from that uh viewpoint of if I can get back over here real quick. There it is. Of uh what you need to be doing month by month as an AD. Uh so that’s there. All of our health and safety policies, lightning policies, um concussion policy, second cardiac arrest, everything under our health and safety, um physicals, things like that. catastrophic insurance, the explanation of the catastrophic insurance, which we’ll talk more about catastrophic insurance later on today. Uh that’s all on here. Coaches education sports rules book. We encourage your co head coaches to be able to access uh those rule books uh on their phones. So they have they have access to that, but that’s there as well. Uh so there’s a lot of information on here. Uh quick link to our constitution and bylaws is on this page. So, a lot of uh useful stuff on this athletic administrators page on our website. Going back to the main page, there’s just some quick links over here on the side, bulletin boards, member directory if you need to look up another school, uh portal access. So, if I were you, if I was in AD, really my quick links and my athletic administrators page, that’s where my f my main focus is. Um up here at the top, if there’s something sports specific you need to look at, you click on sports and you can go to an individual sport and pull it up. We’ll have that sports calendar on there and particular regulations for that sport. We handle the regulations for each sport. Okay? And so if you have a question about a particular what what’s in the regulations as far as postseason uh qualifying, how the postseason structure is for a sport, go to that sports page. the sports regulations will be there and you can access uh that information there as well. Um any questions about anything website related? Like I said, there’s a lot on there. We know and we’re doing our best to try to clean it up and make it more streamlined for you all as best we possibly can. Okay. Next thing I want to talk about is coaching requirements as far as education goes. Um, so there’s two separate categories when it comes to coaches education. One that everyone needs to be doing every year, the annual requirements for all coaches, not head coaches, but for everybody if they’re a coach at your school, they need to be checking these boxes. And this is initially these were things that we brought online, but now as far as as part of being the part of the Safe Stars Act that was passed by the state legislation, these annual trainings are now state law. They’re they’re part of state law now. So, um, annual training requirements, that’s your your concussion and sports, that’s your sudden cardiac arrest, that’s your heat illness prevention. Those are all courses that are provided on the NFHS network for free. Um, Safe Stars also requires CPR and AED training. And I get a lot of questions about this one. I I oversee sports medicine. Um, so this is one of the things that that we get a lot of questions on is what’s the difference between training and certification? Like my school district requires all of our coaches to have CPR certification. That’s great. And that certification if it’s done if it’s the the Cadillac 4hour long certification course if your district is requiring that for your coaches and they’re doing that that certification as you know is good for two years. Okay. So the question one of the questions I get is if I’m CPR certified and it’s good for two years and my district is keeping up with my certification make sure I need to re read up it when I need to. Do I need to do the annual training? And the answer is if you’re looking at compliance with the state law, if they’re CPR certified for two years, they’re good. Okay, the training is not the same as certification. Training is like a it can be done in 45 minutes. Okay, the training CPR training is primarily compressions. It doesn’t involve the mouth, the breathing part. Doesn’t involve like uh the himlink maneuver and things like that. Other things you learn in that that certification course. It is compressions in conjunction with use of an AED because the research has shown if you just do compressions and you have an AED available, the survival rate for someone that’s having a sudden cardiac arrest is increases by about 75%. With just the combination of those two things. Okay, so that’s what the training focuses on. And there’s a there is a CPR and AED NFHS course available that’s not for free. We really wish it was for free. We told them, “You need to find a way to make that free.” Uh, it is a $10 course. Uh, but there’s other courses. There’s other ways to get that training in place. Uh, if you’ve ever used Project Adam, Angel Carter with Vanderbilt uh, Sports Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital, which is a great resource. They have different people across the state. They’ll come in and they’ll do training for anybody for free anytime. Reach out to them and uh, they’ll they’ll be happy to do it. they’ll knock out the entire coaching staff at one time. Um, because the training provides they’ll bring in CPR compression. You you’ll get a hands-on uh training for that uh through that as well. So, I would highly recommend reaching out to Angel Carter and Project Adam. Um, there’s other courses if you have your uh school nurse or your athletic trainer if they’re a certified CPR instructor, they can do a training for your coaches. So work, talk to your school nurse, talk to your athletic uh trainer, see if they can coordinate a time to get your coaching staff knocked out and get that CPR AED training. So if they’re not certified that they need to then do the annual training once a year. If they are certified, hey, it’s a great refresher. Go in do the it’s like 45 minutes again. Have them go through the the training. Make sure they know all all the the process of using CPR compressions along with an AED. Um, so those are the annual trainings. Everyone needs to be doing those. Uh, the one-time training that’s required for non-faculty coaches and classified employees. Okay, you as an AD really need to pay be uh pay attention to this one. Uh, this is in our uh in TWSA bylaws. uh that if you are a non-faculty coach, if you are a classified employee, uh classified employees like your teachers assistants, your substitute teachers, things like that, um they need to one time complete NFHS fundamentals of coaching course and the NFHS first aid health and safety course. And once they’ve done that, then uh they are good to go. That’s a one-time requirement. Yes. Or assistant or both. either if they are it doesn’t matter if they’re head coach or that is if they are a non-faculty coach whether they’re a head coach or assistant or if they’re a classified employee head coach or assistant doesn’t matter that’s a great question because we get that a lot too well my head coach has done it do I so my assistants are covered no they’re not going according to our boss they everyone who is a non-faculty or classified employee has to do these okay and the other question is get one of my non-faculty coaches is a doctor does he have to do the fundamentals coaching. Guess what? We’ve had a lot of doctors over the years that have gone through and have done the NFHS fundamentals of coaching. Some of them actually use it because they have to get professional development credit throughout the year each year as well. They actually use that as as part of their professional level. And so the answer is yes, we do that. Tell the doctors that. They’re like, I could teach this course. That’s great. But they have to do it according our bylaws don’t really allow for any type of uh uh other options to replace these. Okay. Questions about any of these? Uh two new course and these are optional but I would say if I were you I would definitely look into these. Uh for the athletic director uh NFHHS has created an emergency action planning for afterchool activities course. Uh it’s a free course on the NFHS Learn platform. Uh so if you’re in the process of revamping your EAPs, getting those up to date, uh or if you you’re brand new and you have you don’t have any emergency action plans, you need to have those for all of your athletic facilities. This would be a great course to help you begin that process or just help you as you’re going through your review, making sure you’ve gotten all your bases covered. So it’s called uh emergency action planning for after school activities. It’s a free course on the NFHS learn platform. Highly recommend you all uh checking that out. Uh it’s probably about a 45 minute roughly course. Okay. Um the second one, coasting mental wellness. This is a new one that the NFHS has put out as well. Um this is a big thing. We’ve started a uh student advisory committee uh this year. We created a student advisory committee. They’re going to begin meeting periodically throughout the year. It’s involving students from across the state. Okay. Got about 20 students from across the state on the student advisory committee. And one of the things that that uh Lamar Lee and Lexi Crawford in our office who are overseeing that committee, they’re talking to the kids, give us some give us some feedback of what’s important to you all from as an athlete in your school. Mental wellness is what was probably the number one thing they put out. Can you do anything to help provide more resources for us as athletes in terms of mental wellness? It’s a real thing. All right. And it’s something that they even the kids are very reticent to knowing about what’s important with recognizing mental wellness. What this coaching mental wellness course does is this. It does not certify the coach as a a a counselor, you know, as someone that that’s not what it is. This is primarily to help coaches be able to recognize certain signs and symptoms with their athletes, certain tendencies, and give them a way to sort of a pathway to get them the right kind of resources and contact with the right people if they do start noticing things. If for nothing else, it’s for recognition for coaches more than anything else. Just something else to help them realize because when we were growing up, we were athletes. It was the suck it up and go mentality, you know, that’s pretty much what it was. And uh get tough. Just it’s okay. Just get tough. It’s not like that anymore. Um because the kids just don’t operate that way anymore. And plus, they’re dealing from a social media standpoint. They’re dealing with a whole lot more stuff than we ever had to deal with. You know, when I messed up growing up, it was only the people in my little group or my town. It never really got outside of that. And and really once once people from church found about it, my parents found out about it and I’m lucky to still be here in some cases. Nowadays, if kids mess up, the entire world can literally see it with social media because all it takes is somebody posting a video of somebody doing something stupid and now the entire world has the ability to see it. That’s something that mentally a high school kid has a hard time process. Anybody has a hard time processing. So there’s a lot of things that kids are having to deal with from a so from a a mental wellness standpoint we never had to deal with. So this is an important thing I would say give this to your coaches. This is a resource that I think that would benefit them and help them better serve their kids. Okay. Uh just real quickly Safe Stars we we’ve been underneath Safe Stars legislation for the past couple years now. Uh nothing no real changes there other than is making sure that uh your coaches are within compliance. here within compliance with what the Safe Stars Act uh requires. Um the we have a link to the Tennessee Safe Stars Initiative web page. If you have questions about what’s required by Safe Stars under the health and safety policies on our web page, you can go to that website. Uh the Department of Health, Tennessee Terry Love, their group works do a great job uh in overseeing that. They’ll answer any questions you have far as uh Safe Stars Act as well as the Smart Heart Act. Smart Heart Act was a legislation that came into effect last year. Basically, a lot of the things that Safe Stars cover, Smart Heart Act, it kind of piggybacks on a lot of those, but the focus on that is more the sudden cardiac arrest. And really, it’s making sure you have that, you know, where that AED is at every single athletic event or practice that you have. Where’s the closest one? Do is it accessible? Do people know how to get access to it? Um, do you have enough AEDs? Um there’s a lot of programs out there that are offering AEDs uh at cost. Um we try to anytime we get those resources, we try to either push them out to you or or get them posted as well. Um because the more AEDs you have available for your schools, the better off and the more the safer environment you’re creating. Um so information about uh SmartArt Act, the safe act, that’s on the health and safety policies as well. Any questions about any of this? Okay. the rules meetings uh for this year. Uh the in-person rules meetings and these are posted on our calendar already. Uh those are getting ready to start up within the next couple weeks as far as football and soccer. Uh we I know those two because Richard and I will be hitting the road pretty soon with those. Uh so what you have uh on the left side are the in-person meetings, rule meetings for this year. Uh and then on the right hand side are the sports rules meetings that are only going to be available online and those are always accessible through the portal. Uh where the in-person meetings there will be uh an online option once we get done uh coming off the road for those meetings. We’ll put up an online option just in case someone we know life happens and and they can’t make it the meeting. I would say if it’s an in-person meeting, we strongly encourage the coaches to be there. We require the officials to be there at those in-person meetings because a lot of times the officials are meeting afterwards to have their monthly association meeting uh as well. But it’s the one time all year where you’ve got coaches and officials in one room talking about the rules of their sport, hopefully in a civilized manner. Okay. Um, so there’s a great way to get questions answered. You got the sources of from both sides right there in one room. So if it’s an in-person meeting, push your coaches to go to that in-person meeting. Uh, one of the big reasons why we do is we like getting in front of people and and meeting people. We want to make those connections, make sure we know we can put a name to a face uh when we’re when we’re dealing with somebody on the phone. Okay. uh the CWSA portal and again this is if you’ve never been on the portal there’s a lot on there uh but that’s going to be kind of your home base uh it is uh from a financial standpoint if there’s any type of of membership fees which uh Mr. is going to talk a little bit more about the structure of membership fees this year. Um any type of fines or anything like that. That’s going to be on the portal. Uh that’s where you’re loading up your eligibility. That’s where you’re loading your schedules for your sports, uh your staff. Uh if you have someone that’s coaching your team, we get this a lot. We’re like, “Well, he’s a volunteer coach. He doesn’t get paid.” whether they get paid or not, if they’re working with your team in any form or fashion, if they’re providing instruction, they’re providing supervision, they need to be listed as a coach, and they need to make sure that they’ve gone through and checked off all the coaching requirements to stay in the bylaws. So, that’s important that you have that roster completed and filled out for all of your sports for all your co got a question about how to go on to my team coach portal or my school portal. Yeah. Do you have like an example that we could show everybody in case they’ve never done it before? Yeah. Hang on. Let me see if I can get over to the portal page real quick. So, when you log on to the portal, I’ll go back to athletic administrators. All right. First of all, when you get when you click on this access the portal page at the bottom, there’s some uh Bradley Lambert, our our technology director, he’s created some um tutorial videos to talk about different things with the portal. Uh this portal help desk and knowledge base. If you click on these, you’ll find different portal links. There’s a a full portal walkthrough video, tutorial video down there as well. But if you click this access the portal page and I won’t be able to log into a specific school and you’re going to get basically what what we’re seeing on our end. Um but I’ll pull up a school um so you can kind of see from their portal page. I’ll pick on my old school. Okay. So ignore this stuff down here at the bottom. When you log onto your portal page, here’s what you’re going to see. Okay, this is a dashboard for Brimwood High School. Um, you’ll see an account balance. If there’s any type of membership fees or or fines or anything like that, that’ll show up there. If that’s red, then there’s something that’s owed to the association. If it’s green, everything’s covered. Um, and then on the portal page, you’ll see for every sport, it’s going to have a checklist. Do you have a head coach listed for your active sports? Do you have have you submitted eligibility for your active sport? Have you submitted schedules? And have you attended a rules meeting or someone every any for whether it’s online or in person, there’s a rules meeting uh that’s required for every sport. Okay? And then it gives you a deadline of when that has to be done. So it’s kind of a running clock deadline right there. Uh just so this is a quick reference page for you to make sure each sport that’s coming up has checked their boxes. And over here on the left, there’s some different drop-own menus. Under school, this is where you’re you’re keeping up with your coaches and staff. If you need to add a new coach, you can click on uh coaches and staff, add a new staff member. It’ll walk you through information you need there. Um, if you need to activate, uh, show a list of your active sports, if there’s a new sport that you’re bringing on that’s not activated, you can go there and activate it. Uh, so this is kind of your home base for everything on your portal. Um, there’s also on your portal um, for resources, sports rules books, a quick link to sports rule book, health and safety policy. Now, some of these things on here you as the AD may only have access to, okay? Because ads have a little bit more access than what coaches do. All right? But if your coaches log into the portal, they’ll be able to access uh things that are required from them as well. Um, under education, if there’s an online rules meeting, here’s where you’ll find that. Or if you attended a rules meeting in person, you got a you’ll get a voucher for that. You’ll be able to enter that there. Um, under forms, um, under forms, this is where you’re, if you’re hosting a postseason event and you got to enter a enter a financial report for hosting a postseason event, that’ll be under forms. Uh, there’s there’s a a postseason tournament financial report. Um, there’s membership forms, competition. Uh if you have students that that either academically have earned academic uh achievement awards, you want to download those. If they have a three.5 GPA or higher, you want to recognize those at a banquet, you can download and print off those there. Uh multisport athletes. We’ve got some other some different uh awards that certificates if they participate in the state championship, you can download a certificate to a participation certificate from them there as well. So that’s kind of a a quick overview of what you see on your portal. I’m going to now turn it over to Mr. Reese. He’s going to talk about the governance. Hi Joe. Um always like anytime we have the opportunity to talk a little bit about the structure of the organization and how it is actually governed. I think that’s time well spent because to be quite honest with you until I actually started working for the organization I I’ll admittedly say I didn’t really understand fully how it worked. Okay. And so anytime we can get up here and explain that again I think it’s time well spent. Um as Joe mentioned earlier we we work for the schools. Nobody in the office in Herminates, Tennessee has ever had the opportunity to raise our hand and vote for something that is policy. Okay? We don’t make the decisions. Okay? That those decisions are made by our schools through representation of the board of control and legislative counsel who you put into place. Those are elected positions. Okay? Those two governing bodies were a little bit different. Some states only have one. some states are like Tennessee that have two, but there are two and they have two specific areas of responsibility. The board of control is what you would think of as the really the general um operations of the organization. When you think if you put your school system hat on, whether you’re in public school or you’re independent school, you think about your board of an independent school, you think about your school board for a public school system. Uh the board of control is is very similar in terms of their operations. They select the executive director much in the same way that the head of school would be selected by the independent school board. The superintendent would be uh selected by the public school um board um as well. So they hire and fire me. I do a poor job. Uh they they can they can cast me aside. Okay. and and ultimately they had the final say on on our staff and and what our staff looks like. Uh sports regulations. So when you talk about formats of state tournaments, postseasons, etc. Um the addition of championships per se, uh that all falls under the purview of the board of control. the oversight of the finances of the association. So, the money and how the money is allocated, the the revenue share uh that comes from postseason uh events, etc. That’s dictated by the board of control. We’ll spend more time on the financial piece when we have our administrators meetings in the fall and we have our audit completed. We’re very transparent and to let you know what the financial makeup of the organization is and where your where your dollars go. uh disciplinary action appeal. So if a school is disciplined, if there’s a big fight and they’re pulled out of the postseason uh and the school wishes to appeal, that disciplinary action, whatever that disciplinary action may be, uh then that my decision as the executive director goes away. It’s the board of control that makes that final uh decision. Classification is what they are known for as much as anything in the high school space. they’re finalizing all the classification uh for schools and probably gets as much attention as anything. And then on occasion there will be something that comes up um that is a bylaw issue which is what the legislative council governs um where the legislative council does not have a meeting in time to be able to actually act on whatever issue arises. Uh I could go down the rabbit hole, give you a couple of examples, but anytime something comes up eligibility-wise, council has a meeting out here, the board can take action uh in absence of the council until the council’s able to meet. And then the legislative council, uh they amend all the constitution and bylaws. So the handbook that governs all the transfer rules, etc. Um all the uh again percentages for postseason revenue are actually a council decision. Even though the board controls how the money is allocated that’s a bylaw. Anything that appears in the bylaw sports calendar what you can do in the preseason offseason etc that’s in the bylaws. So that’s governed by the legislative uh council. Um to find out more about this I’m going to give you a couple more slides before we take a break. Um, but if you’ll go to the about TWWSAA, Joe showed you some examples of landing pages on the website. That’s where you’ll find more information about the legislative councils on the board of control, who’s on them, uh, what what they do, where you who who’s your representative, etc. And, and just to give you a quick overview, um, the governance of the organization, the the state is divided into three what we call grand divisions. You’ve got east, you got the middle, and you got the west. Okay. The East Grand Division um has four members of board of control, four members from the legislative council. Okay. There are three athletic districts in each grand division. All right. Athletic district 1, two, and three are in the Upper East. And there’s a representative that’s elected for the first, second, and third district. The fourth member is a representative from an independent school. So, independent schools have representation on both the board and the council. You’ll see those East Tennessee board members. In order to be eligible to um to serve on the board of control or legislative council, you must be a school administrator. Um or if you’re an athletic director that is not a school administrator, if you have that NITAA certification as a CAA or CMA certified uh athletic administrator, certified master athletic administrator, then you can be eligible uh to run um for the board of control and legislative counsel. your Middle Tennessee um you know board and council members. Um Greg is is one of those individuals that fits that mold with the CIA certification. It’s not an assistant principal, but as athletic director first that was selected once that bylaw changed to allows to serve on both um the board and the council. And then the West Tennessee uh representatives you see here. And again when you go to that about TWSAA page that will give you a breakdown. You might not be sure who your representative is. You might not know exactly which athletic direct district you are in. Uh but that information is all going to be found there uh in that on that particular page and you can find out more about the governance and the structure. And then at the middle school space dad middle school any middle school administrators that are here? Excellent. Awesome. So on the middle school the way the organization is set up from the beginning it’s the high school administrators who are elected to the board of control and counsel. The middle school administrators are not eligible for board or counsel. The middle school I would say association was created back in the mid 1990s with the establishment of a middle school committee which in essence has been the driving voice to the board of control and legislative council. So the middle school committee members middle school committee meets at least twice a year. recommendations that come from the middle school committee are then passed on to the board of control and legislative counsel and and generally what the middle what comes out of middle school committee becomes law of the land through the board and the legislative council. Tennessee is very unique in what we do in the middle school space and we’re very proud of what we do in the middle school space. There is no other state that you will find in the country that is doing what Tennessee is doing in the middle school space in terms of offering championships. Um Illinois is the only comparable, but it’s not really a comparable. Illinois has a separate Illinois elementary school association. It’s been in established for about a hundred years. They have a separate board, separate council, separate staff, uh separate operations, and they do great things. But we actually copied their model for championships and brought it under the umbrella of what we were already doing and that was having middle school representation and members in the organization already. Uh so it’s been a system that works uh that has worked really well and we’ve seen the growth of the middle school’s membership go from about 65 or so when it first started um to about 200 uh up until about 12 years ago and then when we started adding championships now we have almost 550 middle schools. Uh so we have a thou over a thousand we have more me member middle schools now than we have high schools. So we now have more than a thousand member high schools in Tennessee. And when you look in the southeast, Florida’s the closest with 840 and they don’t have they don’t have the middle schools. Most everybody else around 400 to 500 folks. So, um, uh, we’re very proud of what’s going on in the middle school space and the opportunities that have been created there. We know on the high school side, a lot of our high school administrators are very involved in in bringing along, uh, those middle schools within their system. So, uh, kudos to everybody, uh, who has who has served in that role over the years. All right. Yep. Sure. Hey guys, listen. As a legislative council member, I’ve set your seat, okay? and you think that your opinion doesn’t make any difference, it does. Call your board control member, call your legislative council member about anything that comes up. We want to hear from you. We don’t hear from you as much as we I thought we ever would. Email us, call us. We’re always open to it. We’re always open to to ideas. We’re looking for ideas. You guys have great ideas and we need to know those things. Okay? Joe said earlier, this is you guys organization. You guys run the organization. Not Mark, not Joe, not EJ, none of these guys do. It’s you guys organization. So, have your voice be heard and do not be scared to reach out to your legislative council member or your board member. Certainly appreciate that. All right, there we go. District level athletic directors, um, if they received their CAA certification previously, if you had more than one school in your district. So, if I was a athletic director with more than one school in my district, I wasn’t eligible before the board of council. Now, you are provided that the uh that that you don’t have more than 25% of the total number of high schools represented in that athletic district. Like if you think about district 1, two, three, uh as long as that school system ad is not representing more than 25% of everybody in that athletic district, then they would be eligible to attend. So for the most part, what that does is most district ads now would be eligible to serve on the board and council. I’m not sure that we would have one outside of Shelby County because athletic district 9 is is pretty much that whole district. So, the district-wide AD in Shelby County, I would say, would probably not be eligible to run. I don’t think that math works, but I think just about everybody else uh would would be the case there. Um, membership dues, big change this year. Uh for some it’s not a big change financially. For some it it it is. Uh for probably about 70% of our schools, you’re going to be paying a little less on the front end. For schools that are paying more, some of you are going to be paying uh significantly more. But we talked about this over the course of the year in administrators meetings where we would try to reconfigure how we were collecting membership dues. we were kind of all over the place at the high school level and the middle school level. Uh at the middle school level, if you were participating in postseason series for a team, you were paying a a fee per team. Um in addition to a standard fee that was kind of loosely based on your enrollment, but you might be paying $300 if you had uh you know a thousand kids and you’re still paying $300 if you had 2,000 kids. So, um, we wanted we looked across the country and said, “What’s maybe a better way to to do this to consolidate this to make it a little bit more streamlined and and we we landed on a spot where a lot of lot of states do where we’re doing a per student basis. So, membership dues are based on per student. So, $150 per student based on the average daily membership, which is the same number that’s used for classification. Uh, the minimum fee would be $300. So if you haven’t if if if your students at $150 don’t take you to 300, the minimum fee is 300. Um the maximum fee for the high school level is 2500 and at the middle school level it’s 1,500. And and then if you are a uh if you are a middle school that is within a K12 grade alignment. Um so uh last last stop for me in the school system. uh was at East Robertson High School. East Robertson High and Middle is a 6 through 12 grade configuration. Uh that middle school, which might be competing in championship series, um they would pay $150 regardless of how many students they have. They’re in the same their high school’s going to pay $150 per kid. And then if you’re the middle school that’s within that same grade configuration, you’re paying uh 150. This this formula consolidates everything. the membership dues, catastrophic insurance assessments, you’re get paying $6 per kid for football players. All of that is consolidated um into a single fee that’s based on school enrollment. Uh the only exception to that would be uh in high school wrestling weight management. Uh the fee has been $12 per student in the past. we’ve reduced that uh to $5 per student, but everything else, all those other fees have been consolidated into one membership due fee that you’ll see on the portal as you start logging in and getting uh into the school year. Um any questions on that? Um the next bylaw change, um no international student can be eligible to participate in athletics after he or she has completed the secondary requirements in his or her country of origin. If you’re in public school setting, uh that probably doesn’t mean a whole lot to you um because there haven’t been many kids that have been coming to the public school system um who are high school graduates in their country. But in the independent school world uh that there are a number of kids um who have come to the US who have finished the secondary school setting uh in their country of origin. Brazil for example uh they they generally are ending in the 11th grade and there was there were students that were coming here at the end of their 11th grade year. They’re high school graduates and they’re uh competing uh in high school athletics. the the membership felt like that was a pretty distinct advantage as there were some pipelines of kids that were that were graduating uh that were that were landing in some schools, but if they have finished their high school compulsory education uh they’re not going to be eligible uh for TWSA and that mirrors the requirements in most other state associations around around the country. Um, if you find yourself in a position where you got an international student, you’re not sure whether or not they’ve completed their compulsory education, uh, there is a source to be able to find out whatever country they’re coming from or whatever province they’re coming from in a particular country. The NCAA keeps up a keeps a document maintained. It’s a live document uh to to tell you what what the uh terminating terminal grade is in each particular country and that’s what that link is there. Um the residence rule u pay close attention to this one. Okay, this was a this was a big change that probably will not be noticed by many um but the residents rule has gone away. So the incoming sixth graders and nth graders, you’re no longer responsible for having to know whether or not they’ve been living with that person if it’s somebody other than a parent for 12 months. Okay. Um so even though there’s no longer a resident’s rule, um students with athletic records are still ineligible if they transfer unless they meet one of the provisions in article 2, section 13. That’s the laundry list of ways in which you can become eligible. Okay. The most common of which is a bonafide change of residence, right? So, let’s do an example real quick. I’m a ninth grader. Um, I’ve established an athletic record. I am transferring uh to another school. I’m going to go live with my uncle in another school district. Um, am I going to be eligible? Okay. Well, if the entire family unit has not moved, uh, I’m still ineligible. Even though there’s not a residence rule anymore, even though it doesn’t matter that I’m not living with somebody that I haven’t lived with for 12 months, the entire family unit did not move. Okay? So, I’ve got to meet another one of those exceptions to the transfer rules. Well, you might meet that new one that we’ll talk about in a little bit. Okay, so the elimination of the residence rule. Some of this stuff’s just kind of interrelated to some degree, but the big one is you no longer have to worry about whether or not Johnny’s been living with his grandmother for the last 12 months, somebody other than than the parent. Okay, we’ll talk more about that, the new transfer rule here in just a little bit. So, the dissolution of the home due to death. Okay, that kid’s going to be eligible. That was listed as a part of the residence rule. So, we needed to keep that there. Uh divorce or separation of the parents, uh that was part of that residence rule. We need to keep that there. Change in foster placement. We were approving all those hardships anyway. So, let’s add that to an eligible transfer provision. So, you don’t have to submit a hardship. And then military deployment of families. We’ll get that quite often. It’s a hardship. Of course, we’re going to approve that. So let’s let’s try to streamline the process so that you don’t have to go through the hardship process. And those are other items that have been added to what I would call an allocart menu of ways in which you’re trying to find an avenue of eligibility for those students who are transfer students. All right. Um article 4 section seven. This is this is something that um we wanted to just kind of make clear. We get we get questions about this quite often. Um, article 4 section 7 basically states that delay the regular season contest are going to be played by NFHS rules. Okay, that’s the purpose of this uh of this particular language here. But what we added to this was to clarify that because facilities used for athletics are are are they come in all shapes and sizes and we don’t we don’t in Herminage, Tennessee say that field’s legal or illegal or or etc. like on-site event management on occasion may comp conclude that compliance with all the safety measures is not feasible. In other words, you may deem your field unsafe. Okay? But under all circumstances, it’s the host school’s responsibility to ensure that the field is safe. If you got a if you’ve got a uh a fence that appears to be a little close to to an out of bounds line, it’s it’s on the school to to determine the safety of that. Okay. We’ll get pictures from time to time in Herminage asking is this field legal or illegal? Is this safe or should we be playing or not? It’s up to the on-site event management to make that determination. Those of us who work in Hermes, Tennessee will make that determination for our state championship sites. But this is to clarify that that that the host site is um is the ones that’s responsible for uh making those determinations. Okay. Um other bylaw changes, just a few here. Um, we clarified in the repeating rule that any student who participates in any school athletics, whether that’s uh middle school or high school for more than two years after entering the seventh grade, she’ll be ineligible for competition for participating in sports in all level at the ninth grade. Um, tournament shares, uh, there was a change that was made. Uh, there are not very many two-day wrestling tournaments, uh, anymore in the state of Tennessee. used to be that was part for the course. And for two-day wrestling tournaments, there was a provision where you had to remit 18% of the proceeds for those gates to the state office. Um, but that’s no longer uh the case. There’s very few of those, but that was that was removed. Um, middle school football sports calendar adjustment was it was adjusted to accommodate for heat acclimatization. Uh, so that that was starting at the appropriate time. um membership classification. Um this was a proposal that basically said this. This came from Christ Presbyterian Academy and it doesn’t change the way things are operating right now, but it would certainly for the future. What it basically said was this is that if if the um if the if the board control is going to classify um a particular sport with certain parameters uh that are different for example than just enrollment and the example right now is division 2 uh division 2 football has more than just enrollment that takes into account then that formula would be used for all divisions. presents in that particular sport in the future. Okay. And and so that’s to ensure that that everybody’s classified by the same standard in a particular sport if something’s being done that’s a little bit different. Um beginning sport. This is to clarify that any school who’s starting a sport for the first time that you get five extra days of offseason practice in addition to what’s already allocated on the TWSA sports calendar. So, for example, if you’re want to start girls flag uh football this year or boys and girls lacrosse, you get five extra days that that other um others would not. And then girls flag football um that was approved to be a recognized state championship that’s going to be played in the spring um in the spring moving moving forward. Now, there was some discussion about u and schools were surveyed about preference from spring or fall. I know that up in Knoxville and some East Tennessee a lot were playing in in the fall. Uh the the majority of schools wanted to go spring. Um and so that’s that’s where we’ll be at least for the for the next couple years. That ever comes back on the table about fall. There’s a lot of other states that do it in the fall and I know spring is getting pretty packed. Um if there’s ever a dialogue about that, that’s again a legislative council um decision and could be proposed to legislative counsel. If there was ever a change, I think our recommendation that would be that you have a one or two year leadin before you actually flip the switch on that. Um and here we go. Uh the new transfer rule, the one that has generated an awful lot of discussion and certainly uh we can discuss today. Um, first time a student transfers to another school due to a significant academic, social, emotional, environmental, or mental health need, provided that the Senate School’s administration does not attest that the transfer is for athletic or disciplinary reasons within 7 days of notification of the transfer. Okay. If you have a fall sport athlete, then that can be submitted through the TWSAA portal beginning Monday. If you have a spring athlete or a winter athlete that does not play a fall sport, um you can hold those. We won’t process those until after the school year starts. Um so our advice just streamlining the process would just be to hold those. Uh they can be submitted uh to us after they have been enrolled in the school. By definition, if they have been in your school for three days, you could go ahead and send that spring spring sport athlete three days into your school year. Okay? Or that winter sport athlete. Whenever you select you, you got kid, it’s it’s kid that has come to you, that student has transferred to your school for significant academic mental health, etc. and you select that as the menu option, then that’s going to trigger an email to the school administration at the school that they are leaving and the clock starts on that seven days that’s mentioned in in the rule. Okay. The principal then has seven days to respond to that email. If the principal does not respond within 7 days, that kid becomes automatically eligible. Okay? it will default that kid and make that kid automatically eligible. Make sure that you are utilizing the the right reason for the transfer. You don’t want to burn the kid’s first transfer for significant academic, mental health, social, emotional if they meet one of the other provisions. Let’s say they’re going from mom to dad moving into a new school zone the first time after, you know, parents have been divorced. You know, there’s a provision already for that. Use the right provision there. So, thank you for pointing that out, Joe. Um, but there are situations where the kids coming from out of state, so it’s not a member school, or the kids coming from a school in Tennessee that’s not a member school of the organization. Okay? If the student is transferring from a member school, you’re going to see that option, the option for the school they came from pop up. But if they’re a non-member school, that’ll be at the bottom of the list. you’ll select non-member school and then you will have to um have to provide the email address of the non-member school administrator so that that information can get to them so they can get that 7-day uh window to to respond uh there. Um so you might have to do a little bit of leg work there getting that contact information for the non-member school administrator. Um so here’s what it would look like. um if uh the email that goes to the previous school. So here we use William Blunt um it’s basically notifying them they’ve got a student that’s transferring um and and that they would click on this link basically to send the response. That’s what the other school is going to click on to be able to send their response they believe is for athletic or disciplinary reasons. Uh give some comments there if you think that it is. Um, and then if nobody ever clicks on that, um, in 7 days, then that student becomes eligible. I’ll I’ll fly through, uh, some of the rest of this. Just really brief, catastrophic insurance. We’ll talk about this administrator’s meetings, but nothing’s different there. In other words, as a member, one of the biggest benefits that you have as a member is that your kids, we call catastrophic insurance, but it’s really like supplemental medical policy basically. uh that if a kid has a injury that’s significant enough where somebody pays $25,000, whether that’s primary insurance, out of pocket, etc., uh then they’ve got supplemental medical up to $500,000 per claim. So, the rule of thumb is simply this. If you got a kid that gets hurt um and it looks like they’re going to have to have surgery, uh you go ahead and initiate the claim process. you go ahead and contact um the uh the the company which we’ve got all that information on our website. They’re very uh responsive. When are they covered? So those kids are going to be covered whenever they’re practicing uh during the sports season or when practice is allowed. So basically if if the sports calendar allows them to practice then and they’re in a school administered activity, then they’re going to be they’re going to be covered. If it’s uh if it’s like volleyball for example, it’s not volleyball season, it’s not the summer, so practice is not allowed and they’ve got weight training and conditioning, uh then they’re not covered unless you bought some additional coverage, which you can do that through this policy as well. Um uh optional catastrophic insurance, that’s the um that that’s the that’s the supplemental policy. see a lot of schools buy that through the same provider. It’s based on the per student rate. I’m not sure exactly what that will be this year. We’ll talk more. There it is. That’s what it was last year. I’m assuming that’s what it’s going to be uh this year. Uh you can purchase that in addition to what you already get as part of your membership if you want. Gets covered all year around all the time. Um accident medical insurance for coaches and athletic directors. We’ve had ads and coaches that have been under the policy uh over the years. It’s rarely ever been used, but if you get taken out on the sideline, break your leg. That’s been in place. Um they’re actually it’s not if we get it, it’s not going to be under the same provider. So, I don’t have details on that yet. We anticipate that we’ll have coverage for that. That used to be under the same umbrella as our officials insurance. It’s not anymore. So, more information of that is coming. I don’t anticipate there’ll be a change in that, but I didn’t want to put specific details up there for you. And there’s the contacts for catastrophic insurance. Uh the the individuals that we deal with, um where you can initiate your claims, all of that is right there. Okay. So, I’m going to hand it back over to Joe. He’ll he’ll take us home. I guess I’ll take you home. All right. Uh and we all had those kids that they may they may not be the best. They may be the best on your team, but they may not. But they’re the kids that you absolutely love to coach. Wish you had 50 of them on your team. They do everything that’s asked. They they stay extra. Uh they they clean up. They they they do they do everything right. And the NFHS has developed the NFHS award of excellence. You have those kids that they are this is what we want our athletic department to be known for is kids like this. um then we have a way to for you all to recognize them. Probably the best way, easiest way for you all to access this form is on our web page. There’s a search bar at the top of our web page and you can use this for anything, not just for for NFHS award of excellence, but if you search NFHS award of excellence, it will send you to the link that will take you to how to nominate those students uh that you have that you um Tennessee uh TWSLA academic awards. I mentioned this earlier. Um, you can access uh these certificates through the portal. Um, and if you have individuals that uh have earned 3.5 GPA during their season, um, and with the winter sports, we typically go by what they earn for fall semester when you’re calculating that. Um, but, uh, you can download those academic achievement certificates. Those are great things for parents to get those. uh at banquetss and whatnot. Um take advantage of those. There’s also team awards. We have academic uh outstanding team awards. If you have a team overall team GPA, two different levels of those uh we have I think uh outstanding GPA and then distinguished uh is the second one. So if your team GPA reaches those, definitely want to recognize that as well. Uh we have three different times throughout the year that we’re going to recognize officials. Um we do uh athletic trainer and sports medicine recognition as well throughout the year uh and coaches recognitions. So, we’re we’re keep an eye out for those uh when those times are coming up and we’ll be pushing those out information about that. Things that you could do to help us uh with officials appreciation, athletic uh trainer appreciation, uh different ideas we pushed out as well. Uh we had a lot of schools last year kind of jump in on this, but both teams got together say, “Hey, we’re going to do something to recognize the officials.” Officials, they loved it. They absolutely loved it. Um so, and as well as for athletic trainers and whatnot. Uh along the same lines this, I kind of mentioned this as ads when you’re talking about uh how you handle officials for your games. Make sure a lot of schools have this for every event that you host, you have a plan for those officials when they arrive and when the game is over uh of making sure that they are handled properly as far as getting uh to their cars, uh getting them off campus. We we have situations. I hate it when it happens, but we have situations where fans get a little too eager to want to talk to the official after the game about something. And make sure you have a plan in place for that as well. And make sure that the officials know what that is, who that person is that they’re talking to anytime you’re hosting anything on campus. Uh mentioned this earlier, parent meeting. Um this is a big thing. Uh we know some schools ads at the beginning of each season they’ll have a parent meeting for the all sports for that season just to get everybody together and talk about what expectations are just from from parent standpoint as well. Uh or if it’s just coaches wanting to have a parent meeting prior to the season as well. We offer a parent meeting presentation template. Uh you can find this if you go to your athletic administrator page. That’s your home base. under education, you’re going to see a link to a parent meeting uh partic pres presentation. And when you go to that link, it’s going to have a template uh just kind of walk you through of what that some different points to hit on if you’re hosting any type of parent meeting, whether it’s you as a AD or your coaches. Uh strongly recommend that the bet, as we all know, the more communication that you provide, the better off things are. So that’s that’s something we provide as well. And again it’s kind of customized. Uh we have all your school logos. So on that template it’ll be you’ll you’ll see that your school logo that you have given to us on that template as well. So you can customize it and tweak it however you wish. Uh unified sports. This is something that’s been growing. We think this is a great program. We partner with Special Olympics. Uh we actually share uh uh an employee with the Tennessee Special Olympics uh KBY Culture in our in our office. He’s our contact person and kind of the liaison with Special Olympics. Uh with our unified sports is great to work with. He’ll do anything for you if you’re trying to get unified programs started in your school or if you already have them. Uh Kobe’s your go-to person. Uh just a quick update on championships and these are sanctioned championships that we have available through unified sports. Uh we’ve had bowling and track and field for the past couple years now. Uh we are bringing on unified flag football state championship in the fall. So if that’s something that you as a school think you’d like to get involved with, uh reach out to Colobby Coulter. Uh that’s his cell phone number. or you can get his email address off of our website as well and he would be happy to work with you get uni anything you need unified sports related as well. Um there are uh assistance that uh can be provided through the Special Olympics Tennessee Special Olympics if you’re unified champion school uh that that Kobe can help you out with as well. So definitely take advantage of that if you feel like you got something uh you want to get programs like that started in your school. They’re great great things. kids absolutely love it. The great thing about unified championships is you’re partnering a special needs student with a a regular education student and that’s just a great dynamic when that takes place as well. So definitely uh look into that. Reach out to Colby if you got questions on unified championships. Back over to Mark and he’s going to take us home. Yeah. It’ll be really quick because I know we we run long uh on you. So, the NFHS network, I just really I’m going to do more of this in the fall. Um, but in essence, a lot of our a lot of our schools, a lot of our high schools are members of the NFHS network. There are some media regulations that go in that produces a lot of questions each year. Um, but certainly those restrictions, we own all the postseason rights for all of our events along with other 48 other states who have the same kind of agreement. So, uh, we’ll get more in the weeds of that in the fall, but there’s certainly some great opportunities, including the, uh, where you don’t have to pay some of these, uh, fees, uh, that you’ve seen if you’re an NFHS network, uh, school. So, we’ll talk more about that. But then high schools, uh, there is an offer if you’re a a high school that joins the NFHS network, um, they have an opportunity to give you two free pixelot units that will video stream your content. So, we got 250 members of the NFHS network at the high school level. Um, so they have the opportunity to provide you great free equipment that will enable you to video stream a lot of content maybe that you’re not doing right there. We also give you some advertising opportunities within that video stream feed that you can sell and keep all the revenue for. Um, I would just encourage you, uh, if you are interested at all in learning more about that, contact Matt Abson and he can give you more details about what that what that looks like and becoming a member. And then Arbiter Game, I’m not going to go into details here, but if you see messaging coming to us about Arbiter Game, it’s kind of a it’s a management platform. A lot of you are paying your officials through Arbiter already, but there’s more features that are available through Arbiter Game. just pay attention to that information when it comes to you. And then a couple things, middle school division. I’ve already talked about the middle school committee. Um the middle school uh has its own area where you can find uh information on the on the middle school portal resources, kind of a cheat sheet for all the portal information and the middle school championships that I talked about earlier in the fall, winter, and spring. We’re offering just about everything except football uh at the middle school level now that we are at the high school level. Just about cross uh girls flag, but some of that stuff may be coming down the road. Um that’s all I got. I know I’ve run over my time. I don’t want to hold the group uh longer than we already have. But uh certainly if you have any questions, you want to talk to us individually. We’ll be around as long as you need to. Any housekeeping? Thank you all. pretty soon.