By Anthony Giachin ’17, Section Editor

As we all know, athletics play a huge part in the Newark Academy experience, but we are also aware of how rigorous of an academic school Newark Academy is. Clearly, academics is the number one priority for both the admissions staff and almost all the students in the school. Although there are kids who love high school sports, and even some that move onto the next level, at Newark Academy, there is a nagging stigma against NA athletics. Many outside schools, especially public schools, often view us as a strictly academic school with minimal athletic competitiveness. However, our recent success in many different sports begs to differ. To get a closer look into NA athletics, I decided to interview our athletic director, Mr. Ted Gilbreath.

Q: How do you recruit players or get athletes to come to our school with all of the regulations that are in place for private schools?

Mr. Gilbreath: The state has all these rules against recruiting and what you’re able to do. There are schools that break those rules, but it is really hard to bring in the kids you want when you’re trying to stay within those regulations. For example, we can’t have an open house with just athletes because they believe it gives the private schools an advantage over publics. To work around this, we try to attract them through the strength of our programs and our coaches. We try to get our coaches from outside to indirectly draw interest to our school. Getting prospective athletes to come to our school is highly dependent on the success of our programs. The fact of the matter is that if we have success, kids will want to come. It is also about kids wanting to come to Newark Academy rather than any private school because it obviously isn’t all about athletics here. Some kids might not be able to do the work and some don’t even want to be held to such a high standard. This is a very unique challenge to find kids who want to be a high level athlete while also doing all that schoolwork. There aren’t that many kids up for that challenge so getting our name out there is helpful to get the kids who are up to the challenge exposed to our school and what we’re about. We want to find those kids but they are just few and far between. The last big key factor is also the price of tuition. Many kids are unable to afford it and that just creates another hurdle for us to jump through when trying to recruit athletes.

Q: How important is sports to a prospective student when being considered for admission?

Mr. Gilbreath: Mr. Taylor’s job (Director of Admissions) is to bring in kids who can contribute. We are looking for kids who can add to Newark Academy beyond just academics, whether that be athletics or extracurricular activities. We assume that all kids who apply can hang academically, but we are looking for kids who go beyond. When thinking about sports, we look for the programs that are in the most need for players and try to push for the admission of athletes based on need. After each season, we evaluate who is graduating, what positions are going to need to be filled, and then go from there. If we need a specific position, like goalie for soccer, then a kid that applied who plays goalie would get the support of the athletic department. It is not enough to get someone who is unqualified into the school, but it does play a role in admission.

Q: What role do sports play in a student’s high school experience?

I wouldn’t be in my job if I didn’t think it was really, really important. I think sports are a laboratory to develop character. Regardless of how athletic you are, if kids are setting goals for themselves and working hard to attain those goals, it translates to their real life. Kids learn from sports and it teaches them how to commit to something larger than themselves. We create great Newark Academy graduates by getting kids to play sports and learn the amazing qualities that sports teach them like teamwork, grit, determination, and hard work. I have learned how to be a man and achieved goals for myself through the lens of lacrosse. I have had to figure it all out for myself through lacrosse and those lessons allowed me to be a better student in school and in life. I approached life with the model that I had applied to lacrosse, which enticed me to work hard and achieve my own life goals. If it were up to me, I would require that all kids play at least one sport per year. I think it’s too easy for kids to quit sports nowadays because I think that teaches kids the wrong message. We learn the most from going through adversity and having to work even harder to attain that goal: that’s where real growth occurs. Nothing teaches kids the power of overcoming adversity like sports. No one is going to go undefeated their whole life; these kids are bound to lose. And with that pain of losing comes resilience, determination, and growth not only as a player, but as a person.

Q: How do you cope with a lack of participation in a specific sport given our small student body here at Newark Academy? i.e. fencing and girls’ basketball this year?

Mr. Gilbreath: It is tough because we can’t mandate anything. We don’t have that much control over recruiting new athletes as we would like. We can’t just call up 20 girls who aren’t normally in the applicant pool and ask them to take a look at our school. However, we can call girls who are considering the school and in the applicant pool to take a look at our program and what were about. It is really hard. Most of our peer schools are also struggling with basketball participation as well, like MKA and Kent Place. It seems like an NA issue, but it is actually a bigger issue. Getting JV sports is even more difficult because we want to develop the younger kids, but we just don’t have the numbers, and there really isn’t anything we can do about that. We almost always end up tilting it towards the varsity to try to get that exposure to a higher level of play to inspire the younger kids there, and try to get them jump on and move into it at full speed. Sometimes, this can be a positive thing, as the only way kids get better is by playing better competition. But what happens a lot of the time is that the younger kids get overwhelmed and are unable to stay afloat. Small school problems, only so many kids to go around.

Q: Is moving kids up to the collegiate level of sports a main goal for NA athletics?

Mr. Gilbreath: I don’t think it is a main goal, but I think it is an awesome byproduct. I want kids to have the best athletic experience of their life here. A lot of kids aren’t good enough to move onto the next level, so I want kids to enjoy this time they have on the field as much as they possibly can and do things that they wouldn’t be able to do elsewhere. Having a kid being able to move onto the next level is amazing, but it isn’t our main goal. Our main goal really is just trying to enrich the player’s experience and make them want to come out every day and practice and get better.

Q: When filling an open position, what do you look for in a coach?

Mr. Gilbreath: My number one thing for a Newark Academy coach is that they be a great communicator. You have to be able to communicate why and when you’re doing things so you can empower everyone to participate when you’re a coach. If coaches come in and don’t do that then they begin to lose control of the team and the players. Beyond that we certainly want them to be experts in their field. We want coaches who have been there before and know what it is like to be on that field. Lastly, we’re looking for someone energetic and positive who will create the environment that we seek to create here at Newark Academy. We want people who will challenge the kids but also support them and make sure they maximize their athletic experience. Of course we want success, but we also want kids to have fun and make sports the best part of their experience at NA. We want good communicators, experts in their field, and energetic positive coaches. A coach plays an enormous role in the experience of a player, so finding a new coach is a long, strenuous process because we always want to get it right so that we can achieve our goal of maximizing our player’s experiences.

Q: How do you balance all the different sports in each season? Do you prioritize one sport over another?

There really isn’t any prioritization. We try to be as equal as possible with every sport so everyone has the same opportunities. The least equality is probably on social media just because of the nature of the sport. Some sports require direct supervision because I have to be there for some games and I have to be posting for that game. But I think in the other sense, like the budget and things like that, there is no prioritization for one sport over another. We want everyone to be as successful as possible and have as good of an experience as possible regardless of their sport of choice.

Thank you for your insight, Mr. Gilbreath. We are very fortunate to have such a wise and dedicated athletic director at Newark Academy to enhance all of our athletic experiences. Mr. Gilbreath and the rest of the athletics office has been very successful in achieving their goal of helping kids  have the best time of their lives playing high school sports. I know that is true for me; I can’t wait to get back out on the field every day, and I attribute a lot of that to the program set up here at NA. I would not be the player or person I am today without the strength of our athletic program. I believe this is the case for a lot of NA students, because sports really do play such a large role in the shaping of young minds. Sports are an essential part of the high school experience and Newark Academy has clearly found a great balance between academics and athletics.