The 2006-07 athletic season at Jesuit High School in Portland, Ore., was the type most athletic directors can only dream about. Five of the school's teams won state championships, five more finished as runners up, 16 teams won Metro League titles, and a slew of other team and individual earned accolades. The entire year was topped off in June when Jesuit was named the nation’s top athletic program by Sports Illustrated.

Athletic Director Mike Hughes credits the program's success to a tight-knit coaching staff and a focus on team rather than individual accomplishments. It’s a philosophy he personally follows by calling on the school’s two previous athletic directors—now serving as assistant principals at the school—for help in guiding the program. Jim Naggi (Athletic Director from 1993-2000) and Chris Smart (Athletic Director from 2000-2005) form a link of experience dating back to the school’s first year as a co-ed institution and help Hughes maintain a continuity that’s spurred much of the program's success. In this interview, Hughes, Smart, and Naggi talk about how they work together, their philosophy on three-sport athletes, and getting coaches to cooperate with one another.

Advertisement

Hughes: As Athletic Director, I appreciate that there are former ADs in the administration here who I can turn to when I have questions. For example, if a basketball coach asks for open gym time at the beginning of the school year, those guys will pull me aside and say, “Do you really want to do that the first week of September? We have traditionally not allowed open gyms so early in the season because cross country athletes who also play basketball will look at it and wonder if they should be going to open gyms instead of running.”

Naggi: It’s more of an informal relationship. The first year I arrived was the last year as an all-boys school, and at that time I was responsible for getting the 10 new girls' programs up and running. It’s handy for Mike to have Chris and I to trace the history of how the program handles situations that have come up before. We don’t sit down and analyze the day-to-day issues, that’s what Mike does, but as far as being resources he can tap into, we’re there for him.

What is your department’s philosophy?

Hughes: In our mission statement, we say we want to educate athletes intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, aesthetically, and physically. Our coaches always remain true to that mission. We stress that our school is about formation, not just information. Those aren’t just flowery words. We want to form them as human beings. We feel that if we educate the whole person it will pay off in all five of those areas.

We have a very strong Catholic ministry program that works on the kids’ self-esteem and makes them feel loved and spiritually and emotionally whole, and that carries over to the sports programs. When they’re emotionally healthy, there aren’t as many team issues or problems with selfishness on the field.

Smart: Our athletic department is a co-curricular program, not extra-curricular. We try to put athletics in its proper place. First and foremost, we’re a Jesuit Catholic school, and we wouldn’t exist if not for the spiritual importance of what we’re trying to do. All our trophies are in the athletic facility, not spread out across campus or the administrative wing. The first thing you see on campus isn’t the stadium or the field lights, it’s the cross above the performing arts center.

What’s made us successful is having a clear mission, and we honor athletics as one part of the educational process. We tell parents, “When you walk into the gym and see banners hanging from the rafters, that’s one sign of accomplishment. But we haven’t been successful unless 10 years from now your children can look back and say, ‘Because of my athletic experience, I’m a better father, better mother, a better citizen, and I’m contributing to society.’ If they can’t say that, then whether or not they won five championships as an individual or a team, we have not been successful.”

Naggi: We’ve all been at schools where the only purpose of athletics is recreation, to win, to entertain, or to occupy the students’ time. Sometimes schools don’t give it a lot of thought and the athletic department is a separate entity not connected to the other things the school does. From the start, we've always said we want the program to complement the classroom and other activities the school has to offer. If there is success as a result, great, but the point is not to win, the point is to be consistent with what the school is about. And more likely than not, the by-product of that mission will be success.

You encourage athletes to play more than one sport at Jesuit. In a time when more athletes tend to specialize, how do you accomplish this?

Smart: We work very closely with our coaching staff to encourage them to share athletes. For the most part, our coaches work really well together. We’ve got a head football coach who doesn’t run a spring practice program because he knows many of his kids are participating in track and field.

Naggi: We all believe competitors are developed in a lot of ways. It can be counterproductive to have a student in one sport for 12 months. It narrows their thinking so they believe they have to master a skill set in one sport in order to be a good athlete. Our philosophy is that you’ll be a better athlete the more you can put yourself in a variety of scenarios where your different athletic skills can show through.

Also, we encourage student-athletes to play multiple sports because it's practical. With only 1,100 kids enrolled here, if each coach had their little cadre of people they insisted stay with their program, there’s no way our teams would be as successful as they’ve been. To be successful in as many different ways for as long as we have been, we need student-athletes who feel comfortable doing more than one thing. Kids don’t get penalized if they only want to do one sport, and there’s not a feeling that if you’re a football player that’s all that you are.

Hughes: We lament what seems to be a nationwide trend to focus on just one sport year-round. We think there’s less chance of injury if a kid plays multiple sports because there isn’t the repetitive wear and tear of one sport. It also develops different muscle groups and allows them to be quicker athletes, better athletes, and have that core strength they may not get in just one sport. They’re also hungrier. They come to a sport they haven’t played in six months, and it’s fresher and more exciting. If they’re playing the same sport in high school and clubs year-round, they tend to burn out.

With attention from the media and college recruiters, how do you keep athletes focused on school and teams?

Smart: We have solid kids who are successful because of our team approach, and because of that they don’t have a lot of ego when it comes to their individual accomplishments. We intentionally try to downplay our individual accolades, so that everything we do is the accomplishment of the team and the school. We talk about that so often that kids are pretty humble and team-focused rather than individual-focused.

Naggi: The kids are so connected with their teammates they don’t want to be that hot-headed egotist everyone dreads. Even coaches for the so-called individual sports—track and tennis—talk about it as being a team sport and they’ve done a really good job making even their best athletes stay connected to themselves.

What do you do to emphasize well-rounded athletes who also excel in academics and other activities?

Hughes: We’re a college prep school and the athletes know that coming in. Not only do we have good athletic programs, but students will be ready for college when they graduate. We send 99 percent of our graduates to four-year colleges and universities. Kids know that academics comes first, and the coaches help with that. If a kid goes to their coach and says they need to redo a science lab and will be late for practice, that’s never a problem.

Smart: It also helps to have coaches on the faculty who know how their athletes are doing in the classroom. They’re constantly monitoring their athletes on a regular basis, and we’re communicating well as an administrative team with our coaches. We also have some pretty clear rules about when practices have to start and finish in order to keep the focus on classes. We end school at 2:30, but freshman football doesn’t start until 3:30 so the players have time to see a teacher for extra help if they need to without having to miss practice time.

Naggi: When there is an academic problem with a student-athlete, coaches work one-on-one with the academic vice principal. Coaches often use athletics to motivate the kid to do better academically. I know one coach who told an athlete who was struggling in a class, “You can practice every day, but you can’t play in games again until your grade is up where it needs to be.” The coach was firm in not letting the kid play games, not fudging things to get him back on the field. If sports can be a spur to help students reach their academic potential, then we’re not good educators if we don’t use it.

What does it mean to be named the nation’s top sports program by Sports Illustrated?

Hughes: First off, our coaches are very humbled by this. Many of them have received national attention and league and state awards, but you would never know that by talking to them. Our program takes this award in stride, and I’m sure our business office will put it on our admissions brochure, but our coaches are always focused on the next game, the next practice. They know the moment it goes to our head we’ll become complacent and lose our edge.

The reason we’ve been successful year after year is that our coaches know even though they may have won championships, it’s the first year on the team for some of their players and those kids haven’t won anything yet. Every year we have a whole new set of kids, and we can never sit and be comfortable with out past accomplishments.

Naggi: If you go back and look over the years since our school went co-ed, it’s been a building process leading up to this point. Inside the department, all our coaches and administrators know we have been running this program the way it should be run. It’s nice when a set of outside eyes validates that we are running the program the right way.