For my service learning project I spent my volunteer hours helping a local high school athletic director with some behind-the-scenes work for his athletic department.  With high school winter sports seasons coming to an end, and spring sports about to begin, the athletic director asked for help with coach performance evaluations.  In the past the coaches met with the athletic director throughout the year, and also at the end of their season, but the athletic director wasn’t happy with the performance evaluation form they had in place.  My job was to create a presentation of three different coach evaluation forms that gave descriptions of each, as well as my recommendation as to which one to implement into their athletic department. 

Along with presenting their school three different evaluation options, I was also asked to study the current evaluation procedure and give my opinion of it.  Upon completion of reviewing the current evaluation, I was to compare my notes on the problems that I found to see if they matched the reasons the athletic director disliked the evaluation. 

Before giving my recommendations I asked the athletic director to review the evaluations and form his own opinion, as to not be swayed by my findings.  I was able to find three different coaches evaluations and review them with ease. After finding and evaluating the three different forms I realized that I hadn’t found any one of them to be perfect and ready for implementation right away.  I came to the conclusion that the best evaluation would be a combination of all three of the ones I had recommended.  I wanted to be able to take the aspects of each I liked and make additions as I saw fit to create the perfect evaluation.  Because of this, I also added in a forth form, which had an additional aspect I found very beneficial. I allowed the athletic director to read through all of the forms and my examinations of them before he read my recommendation of creating a personalized one that encompassed all of the proposed evaluations.     

This project was very successful, and was able to aid the athletic director in his evaluation administration duties.  I found that I really got into this project, coming to the conclusion that each school and athletic department runs their program slightly differently and their evaluations of the coaches should reflect this.  I also suggested that the faculty implement the use of the BARS evaluation techniques which will make their evaluation ratings more uniform.  Overall I thought this was a great experience, and I really enjoyed getting to perform some of these behind the scenes administrative duties.  I am looking forward to hearing how the new evaluation works within this athletic program. 

I have attached the paper I first sent to the athletic director with my reviews of each evaluation and my recommendations so you can get an idea my experience with this project.