Q&A with Mike Schmidt, Athletic Director of Our Featured School: Fairfield High, Montana
DS: What is the best thing about high school sports?
MS: In Fairfield the school is really the center of the community. It seems like every one of the 600 people who live in Fairfield and the 300-400 who live in the surrounding area have a connection with the school … a son, daughter,grandson, granddaughter or a relative who works for the school. So activities at the school are not just school events but community events as well. In Fairfield, a high percentage of our kids are involved in activities so there is a lot of connection with the community.
DS: What is the biggest challenge high school athletes face?
MS: Athletes at our school are always challenged by having many activities to participate in … they always have to juggle multiple sports, being on student council, working in the concession stand, maintaining their grades, etc. This is good experience for life after school. We expect our kids to learn to juggle a lot of activities and actively participate in diverse activities.
DS: How has the way high school athletes train changed over the years?
MS: At Fairfield the year-round sports — especially basketball and football and volleyball — have really been the biggest change. We see more specialization and certainly more time put into specific sports. Our teams are playing a lot of games in June and July … this can be positive for the team and individual success but can put a burden on the athlete and the family as well.
DS: With the decline of local newspapers nation-wide, do you think it’s more important than ever for athletic departments to promote their own teams and athletes? How does DS help you do that?
MS: The community is gradually changing to more of an online community and is utilizing the offerings more and more. We basically used LeagueMinder the past two years as a scheduling tool and really did not use the reporter/website functions as much.
With the changes to the DS Reporter, which has made it easier to upload and work with media, we have attempted to work on our website and to try to utilize this part of the DigitalSports solution. So far things have been improving and we are happy with the overall response.
Our goal is to have our site really up to date and ready to go for the Winter sports season, and then to advertise it to the community and hopefully begin to get them to use the site for more school communications. There are some great functions from DS like the signing up for email notification. We gradually are getting more parents to sign up with that and hope to have a bunch more in the winter.
DS: How important is it to have the support of your entire community?
MS: We are pretty fortunate that our community really supports all of our sports and activities … but we are always looking to improve, in any way, our communications and ties with our community.
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