AD updates board on sports programs
By John Earp
At the January meeting of the Jal School Board this past Monday, Athletic Director Brent Satterwhite spoke about the district’s policy with regard to sports participation; specifically, about athletes who decide to quit a particular sport during the season. Satterwhite said he had found that Loving’s policy had some very good ideas in it. He also mentioned the importance of teaching student-athletes the importance of not quitting, as perseverance is a very important thing to be developed in life.
Satterwhite pointed out that Loving’s guidelines specify that if a student quits a sport midseason, they will have to sit out a certain number of games if they want to play in another sport. “And it even covers, say, kids competing in two sports in the spring and they want to quit one, or they have to miss a competition from the other one if they do that, so it encourages them not to do that as well,” he said.
He continued, “And you know, the thing I think that is important about how we do this is that we discourage kids from quitting, but we’re also understanding that, you know, life happens and things go on, but we want to really discourage them from doing that and teach them how to get through things that are difficult, because there’s always going to be times that [a student] gets mad at me and he wants to quit football, and then two weeks later, I’m his best friend, and you know, he loves me because he realizes now that it was good.”
Satterwhite brought these things up to the school board as a discussion item only at this point, with more discussion and a decision on possibly revising current district policy in the future. He also mentioned the fact that this potential new policy would likewise cover academic disqualification, which he noted was not really all that difficult to avoid in New Mexico, which only requires a D average in order to compete in sports. This is in contrast to Texas, he said, which requires a minimum of a C average. Students whose grades fall below a D average have to sit out basically for the rest of the season due to the nine-week penalty period of academic disqualification.
Satterwhite also mentioned that the boys and girls basketball teams did well at the Jal Invitational Basketball Tournament this past weekend, each team winning all three of their games in the tournament. The teams they beat were the Academy for Technology and the Classics (a Santa Fe charter school), Cloudcroft and Magdalena. The Panther Girls are 6-8 overall, while the Panther Boys are 6-6. The boys travel to Ruidoso this weekend to play against Ruidoso and Capitan. The girls will play Lovington this Thursday at home and then will travel to play Capitan on Saturday. Satterwhite also mentioned that the Powerlifting Team traveled to compete in their first meet last Saturday in Lovington, with a couple of lifters whom Coach Loftis felt were ready to compete.