Weekly Reflection

My first week as an Athletic Director intern went exceptionally well. It started bright and early Monday morning and ended Friday afternoon. Throughout the week, I attended the Athletics Department meeting, the Marketing Committee’s meeting, Afternoon Activity’s meeting, and I also sat in on a meeting with a Kelley Sports Inc. representative discussing uniform options for next year. The major discussion of the Athletics Department meeting was liability and how it is becoming a growing issue for prep schools, specifically at Proctor. Some of the more pressing concerns regarding liability at Proctor is the climbing wall, the weight room, and the throwing of lacrosse, softball, and baseball’s in the open gym with unsafe conditions. The Marketing Committee meeting was an hour and a half meeting talking about how Proctor could be better marketed. The main topics of discussion were the admission view book for next year and the website. This meeting made me realize that an Athletic Director can be and usually is involved in more aspects of the school than just the Athletics Department, such as the Marketing Committee. The Afternoon Activity’s meeting is a newly created group with the hope of bringing much deserved recognition to the afternoon activity’s at Proctor, such as theater and woods team. The objective of this first meeting was to try and create a mission statement regarding the afternoon activities at Proctor. This meeting showed me that the Athletic Director is responsible for not only representing athletics, but also all of the other options that Proctor has to offer in the afternoon. Among all of the other meetings, I also had the pleasure of sitting in on the meeting with the Kelley’s Sports Inc. representative regarding the uniforms for next year. This was especially cool because I got to see how an Athletic Director has to work within a budget and also has to try and be as fair as possible with regards to which teams get the new uniforms each year. Unfortunately, it cost about two thousand dollars for a set of uniforms, so only about four or five teams can purchase new uniforms a year.
Along with all of the various meetings, my first week also consisted of working on projects, and assisting the equipment manager, Jake, on game day preparation. One of the projects I worked on creating a spreadsheet that recorded each Proctor teams records for the past six years. After having this information, I then cross-referenced it with the list of disciplinary violations for the past six years. The hope was that there would be a correlation between years with the least amount of disciplinary violations and the year with best sports records. This was in fact proven. Throughout the past six years, there has been a definite correlation between winning athletic records and a “winning” community. Along with this project, I also worked on my on-going project of my own personal athletic philosophy, and what I think the role of athletics is at Proctor. Overall, my first week as an Athletic Director went really well!