Season 1, Episode 10 - Rumors and Reputation

Original Airdate - January 6th, 2002

Welcome to 2002! Emma is headed to Coach Armstrong’s classroom to turn in an assignment and spots him in some kind of private conversation with Liberty. He has his arm around her, which strikes Emma as very odd. She asks Liberty about it, but Liberty is cagey. At lunch, she’s watching Armstrong and sees him touch Liberty’s arm and hand her a note. It’s all just a little weird!

Emma brings her concerns to Manny and asks her if Armstrong has ever touched her. Manny is shocked. Armstrong is really nice, but he’s never been inappropriate. Emma wonders if he’s too nice, and tells Manny about his interactions with Liberty. Could something inappropriate be going on? Unfortunately for them, Terri overhears.

The rumor mill does its thing, spreading and expanding as it passes from person to person. Terri tells Paige that Emma saw Armstrong coming on to Liberty and handing her a love note. Paige texts her friend, future series regular Hazel Aden. Hazel talks to someone else on the phone and says someone saw Liberty and Armstrong kissing in his car. Sean overhears.

Sean tells Spinner that Coach Armstrong gave Liberty a ride to school. Gross! Spinner tells Jimmy they’re having sex. Jimmy tells Ashley, finally bringing the rumor to someone who knows Liberty well. At the student council meeting, Liberty seems totally oblivious to why people would be talking about her. Ashley tells her what people are saying. Liberty denies it and runs off upset.

The rumor has worked its way back to Emma. Because of how much it changed and the fact that she didn’t say anything to anyone but Manny, Emma has no idea that she was the source. She corners Liberty, offering her help, but Liberty insists it’s all a lie. Emma believes her and promises to help her find the source of the rumor.

She follows the rumor’s path back to Terri and confronts her about speculating about stuff like that with Paige. She should have known Paige would spread it around. Terri throws it back in her face. Emma is the one who was speculating and Terri only overheard. Emma feels incredibly guilty. In math class, the vibes are really tense and strange. Raditch comes in and calls out Armstrong and Liberty, and Emma realizes she needs to act.

She comes clean about her part in starting the rumor, and Armstrong avoids any unnecessary investigation. Emma tries to apologize to Liberty. Yes, she talked to Manny, but she didn’t spread anything around. Liberty doesn’t want to hear it. Turns out, Armstrong has been helping Liberty since she was diagnosed with dyscalculia. Being good at school is core to Liberty’s sense of self, and she was really struggling to process. The coach was only supporting her. All Emma did was make everything way worse. Liberty does not accept her apology.

Very brief B story, since most of the cast is wrapped up in the Liberty/Armstrong rumor mill. Spinner thinks the food in the cafeteria has been getting grosser, and feels vindicated when he finds a fly in his food. Unfortunately, he flings the bug away before he can show anyone, and no one believes him. Desperate to prove that there are bugs in the food, he makes the misguided decision to plant earwigs in Ashley’s lunch, since she will be believed.

Ashely basically catches him, and Ms. Kwan hears their argument. Spinner has to pay to exterminate the cafeteria by working for free. No one believes him that there were already bugs, and Jimmy and Ashley make fun of his hairnet. But hey, at least he got the cafeteria cleaned.

Welcome to a fun, new kind of essay where I become curious about something and spend too much time trying to research the answer. Coach Armstrong is both basketball coach and math teacher. I also went to schools where sports coaches taught classes. But as I thought about it more, I became curious how common this combination really is.

In my high school, all of the coaches taught classes. I think. I didn’t play high school sports. I suppose it was possible that some sport or another had a community member coach. Because Alabama, where I went to school, does not require coaches to teach.

Like most laws in our weird country, the requirements for school-based coaches vary wildly state to state. Though many schools hire teachers as coaches, this is more a factor of convenience and recruiting than requirements. When hiring a new coach, it’s easier for a school principal to look amongst current staff, and teachers have a number of skills and trainings related to (you’ll never believe this) managing and instructing children that are obviously helpful to a school sports coach.

So looking at some specific numbers, though coaches in 42 of 50 states require multiple coaching specific trainings, requiring teaching licenses is very rare. Often these training are even completed after a coach is hired, though one state does mandate that those with completed trainings are considered the same as teachers during the coach hiring process. From what I can tell, this tracks with Canada as well.

Two interesting trends in the world of coaching training. First, a focus on mental health training, an area where coaches are suggesting they’d like even more support. Some of the trainings called out as most interesting by coaches surveyed in 2022 were trainings to help players with performance anxiety and help build relationships. The world was clearly inspired by Coach Armstrong’s efforts to support his students.

Secondly, teacher-coaches are becoming less common. Only 50% of coaches surveyed in the same study were educators. Others are professionals taking on coaching for additional income, parents of athletes or sometimes community volunteers.

One of the things that made me so curious about the teacher/coach is that, at my high school, the teachers who coached were seen as less skilled than teachers who didn’t. They were the “easy” teachers and you wouldn’t learn much. It was a widely held belief that none of them wanted to be teachers at all, but instead phoned it in in the classroom so they could focus on their real passion, sports.

I find it difficult to imagine a person going through the trouble of becoming a teacher, a difficult, thankless career path that requires hours of on-the-job training, to become a high school football coach. Especially because it’s not a requirement, I question the beliefs of my teenaged self and his peers that none of these coaches cared about teaching at all.

Digging into the data, however, the story is someone complicated. Let’s start with quality of education. A study from researchers at Harvard, Rice, and the University of Arkansas so no difference in math and reading scores for students educated by coaches vs non-coaches.

But the effects on the teacher/coaches themselves are far more severe. Teaching is already stressful, requiring long hours, personal resources, and accepting chronic underpayment. Add a sports team into the equation and it’s easy to see how things get intense. More hours, more responsibilities, more stress.

Plus, parents tend to be incredibly difficult to manage. In that same 2022 coaching survey, coaches reported that only 60% of parents modeled good sportsmanship, and a third of parents directly criticized their coaching. Sports coaching puts a teacher squarely in the public eye. There is often more glory or positive attention to be received from the community at large, but that comes with increased scrutiny and criticism.

Often this leads educators to choose. Some, like the stereotype from my own high school, become coaches who teach. They pour the bulk of their energy into their sports team and perform at the bare minimum in their classroom. Others go the opposite way, and see coaching as the frustrating add-on to their primary role.

As with many things in education, the issue is resources. Decreasing teacher stress by increasing pay and resources would obviously make educators more willing and able to take on the role of coach, and more effective at both roles. I suspect, though I do not have the research to back this up, that the decline in educators as coaches is because of the general decline of resources and support for teachers. It’s getting harder to teach, so it’s getting harder to teach and coach.

I believe that, at their best, most teacher-coaches would be a Coach Armstrong. Most coaches get into school-based coaching because they love and believe in youth sports. Most educators want to do right by their students and would love to be able to provide the kind of mental health resources and support Armstrong provides Liberty. Despite all of the surveyed challenges, 96% of the coaches in that 2022 survey said they’re satisfied coaching.

Teenaged John and his teenaged peers have an excuse for their lack of empathy for their teachers. Teenagers are assholes. But I will never understand why, as adults, we disrespect and fail to support people who want nothing more than to do right by our children.