The Sun Journal article “Seeking a change” by Randy Whitehouse (March 13) is the latest commentary on a decades-old and unresolved contradiction in Maine public school governance. New proposed legislation (LD 395) seeks rightly to prevent the Maine Principals’ Association from banning high school runners and cross-country skiers from participating in competitions beyond — and usually above — the level of high school events. It would also specifically allow those more motivated athletes to maintain their coaching relationships outside of the narrow dates of the high school competitive seasons. I wrote to that very issue in the Sun Journal 25 years ago and other times since. These are the factors which make the passage of LD 395 rational and necessary:

• Endurance sport is not seasonal, as growth itself is not seasonal. Forcing it to remain seasonal, under whatever bureaucratic rationale, cancels the very principles of developmental physiology upon which endurance performance improves over an extended, continuous period of time.
• That period of time is not three months of a season, but minimally a year — and then years.
• That development, and it is joyous as it must be persistent, requires a thoroughly educated and devoted coach who is willing to stand with an athlete or group year-round, if not always present at least with a written training plan and competition calendar appropriate to each athlete’s age and ability.
• International training science favors systematic training over too much competition. High school schedules generally focus on many competitions with seriously inadequate training preparation. That is simply abuse by omission which is structured into the various seasonal restrictions imposed by the MPA. Those restrictions, in fact, guarantee that our athletes remain mediocre. (A similar point was made by Kalle Oakes about Maine basketball in the Sun Journal, Feb. 24.)

No athlete or coach with a sound, curious intellect, education and sense of academic integrity should have to submit to the obvious ignorance of those restrictions. Years ago, “Doing Sports Right” was published with some fanfare by the University of Maine Education Department. It talked mostly about behavior but also noted the athlete’s right to informed coaching and training environments. In public school endurance sport, I have not witnessed a single effort to insure athletes’ and coaches’ rights to develop and succeed — the essential freedom to perform to one’s highest potential, potential which may not even appear without several years of intelligent training activities.

Every single effort I have seen by administrators has worked precisely to the contrary of those rights and goals. Punishing a coach for working with a young athlete out of the prescribed high school season is but one example of such small-mindedness. And that from people who presume to be educators. Dick Durost, MPA executive director, exhibits the same vacuous approach to the problem that I heard 25 years ago, and his response to Whitehouse’s query is simply complaisant, smug and stunningly ignorant of the endurance sports he thinks to govern.

It’s clear the MPA is not capable of education. It is time for LD 395 to allow Maine athletes and coaches to join the world in the full freedom of modern endurance sport.

Richard Taylor was U.S. Olympic Nordic team captain in 1964; U.S. national team staff coach, 1979-91; Gould Academy running and Nordic ski coach 1987-2007; and author of “No Pain, No Gain? How Athletes, Parents and Coaches Can Re-Shape
American Sports Culture,” (2002). He lives in Bethel.