First Year Coaching

This letter I will post is from my first year. I will answer within the letter. That first year, we had some players that were playing (who had played spring sports) that did not have a physical on file. Once we found out about it, we turned ourselves into the IHSAA. The IHSAA ruled that we were not to allow it to happen again and put on probation. No games were forfeited by the IHSAA's ruling, nor the players ruled ineligible.

"This is a good faith letter from a Henryville resident. It is a well known fact (not true, as we had thought we knew, but didn't know for sure because the AD was out of school for two days. Once we found out, I contacted our Principal at the time Denise Bessler...we received this letter just hours later). that Henryville has played a player or players in Varsity boy's basketball games that are not eligible for play due to the lack of having a physical. (This is a true statement, but as posted above, the IHSAA ruled on it with only probation as a negative consequence)

As a principal who has prided herself on being a rule follower, I feel confident that you will do the right thing and report this incident to the IHSAA (which we did before we received this letter). This will no doubt result in the forfeiture of games played while using ineligible players. (IHSAA did not rule that way). This incident shows an extreme lack of communication and administrative skills by the Athletic Director and the Head Coach, resulting in severe damage to Henryville High School's reputation. (Again, the IHSAA ruled only probation, many coaches in the area were alarmed when I spoke of this because they hadn't been as stringent as we had in checking on this) This lack of responsbility will unfortunately penalize the players and the community. (I accepted responsibility for the probation that was received for this "lack of administrative skill") However, the lesson of admitting your mistakes far out way (misspelling) teaching our kids to cover up something we know is wrong. (Could not agree more!!!)

Please address this matter immediately or the next course of action may be to notify the IHSAA officials and local new (misspelling) media directly. The eyes of the community are watching to see how you handle this situation.

A Concerned Citizen.

Looking back on this, we were terribly upset that someone in our own community would write such a scathing, anonymous rebuke of what we were doing. We felt we were working to correct what had been done and were waiting on the response from the IHSAA. It is apparent that the person who wrote this letter (still don't know to this day) had some agenda, something they were not happy about besides this issue as they not only sent this letter to me, but our AD, our Principal, our Superintendent, and every school board member without checking with our AD or me.

Looking back, it did not make me happy at the time that I hadn't done my job thoroughly enough and risked potentially having wins taken away from a team that had battled to get to .500 at that point. Luckily, my mistake didn't cost that team and I have done a much more thorough job in checking things like this as "the eyes of the community are watching".