Personnel Issues

A basic and very important piece of the personnel management system from both a hiring and evaluation perspective is the creation of detailed job descriptions that clearly express the responsibilities and work expectations of each employee.  Job descriptions set the foundation that will affect hiring decisions, contract and compensation negotiations, annual performance evaluations and daily supervision of personnel. At the very least, job descriptions should include all of the following elements:

Planning for the next academic year has already started with August athlete and coach orientation and workshop sessions high on the list of priority programming.  Sexual harassment and other forms of coach and student-athlete misconduct are  “must do” sessions along with issues of legal liability given the current litigation and media risk landscape.  Educational programming and policy revisions must define clear behavioral expectations and what constitutes misconduct.  What should the content of these sessions include?

Note:  The following material is excerpted from a pre-publication manuscript:   Lopiano, D.A. and Zotos, C. (Publication 2014) The Athletic Director’s Desk Reference. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.

A:  No.  Sexual harassment and inappropriate coach-athlete relationships have always been a part of the sport landscape.  Unfortunately, in the past, student-athletes were afraid of reporting coaches, parents often took the side of the coach and told their children to “tough it out”.   The media, afraid of reduced access to coaches they offended, ignored the issue and schools and colleges did their best to sweep these situations under the rug.

What makes today different are a series of factors:

A:  Absolutely not.   As soon as the institution becomes aware of rape or sexual harassment, Title IX requires the institution to do all of the following: (1) act immediately to stop it and restore a safe environment, (2) act immediately to prevent its reoccurrence, (3) advise the victim of his/her right to file a formal complaint and explain the procedure for doing so, (4) assure the victim that he/she will not have to confront her alleged abuser in the complaint process and (5) report the behavior and submit the complaint to the Title IX Coordinator and if criminal behavior

There is a tendency for athletics departments to place stringent restrictions on the use of social media by student-athletes.  On one hand, social media use should not be used to violate athletics department or institutional policies on such standard subjects as sexual harassment, bullying, respectful conduct,  or conformance with NCAA or governance association rules.  On the other hand, every student-athlete and staff member has a right to free speech.  Thus, the athletics department should consider utilizing educational efforts as its primary mechanism to encourage res

The macho, tough-it-out culture of highly competitive sport encourages athletes to endure physical pain or abusive levels of exertion in silence.  It is also common for competitive sport environments to breed an expectation of student-athlete obedience to the demands of coaches, even if such demands are unreasonable.  Student-athlete acknowledgement of physical distress is often interpreted by teammates and coaches as a sign of weakness, generating peer pressure to maintain silence and play through injury and potentially dangerous levels of fatigue.   Often, misguided no

A:   Never underestimate the leadership power of the athletics director (AD).  The AD should consider establishing all of the following practices to encourage diversity in hiring, recruiting and retention:

A:   In higher education, an athletics policy board, usually named the Intercollegiate Athletics Council, consisting of faculty, administrators and alumni from outside the athletics department is often a governance association requirement.  Even if it isn’t, having an objective, majority faculty oversight board in place to annually review key diversity performance indicators and to be involved and invested in the achievement of diversity objectives is very beneficial.  Consideration should be given to establishing a goal for this group to be 40-60% minority (female and n

Key to achieving objectives is specifying those actions and programs that will produce desired results and tracking these actions and programs as “key performance indicators” (KPI).  Thus, each objective in the strategic plan should have a list of KPIs and how those KPIs will be tracked.   Further, consideration should be given to tracking KPIs by employees responsible for their achievement (i.e., tracking the race, ethnicity and gender of all employees by supervisor responsible for hiring that staff unit).  Following are examples of KPIs that are matched to diversity ob