Here are 3 key insights in 3 minutes on the 3rd day of the 3rd week at 3:33 PM that will hopefully make you want to do one of 3 things: Think more about it, share it with others, or do something with it.
The cycle of compliance never stops
Every August, somewhere, an athletic trainer walks into an AD’s office holding a manila folder like it’s a summons. A JV volleyball coach’s CPR card expired on June 30th, and practice starts in four days. Most ADs carry 10, 15, 20 coaches on staff and couldn’t tell you, off the top of their head, which certifications are still current, because nobody’s checked since the previous September. Someone ends up digging through a filing cabinet that hasn’t been opened since spring, cross-referencing expiration dates against a list that, it turns out, doesn’t exist. Here are three things that would save that scramble before it ever starts.
1. The paper trail nobody owns
Every certification an AD deals with runs on its own clock. CPR cards last two years. Concussion training resets every twelve months. Bus driving certification or re-cert has its own expiration window entirely, and it rarely lines up with when school actually starts. State coaching licenses renew on their own schedule too, and none of them line up with the school year.
It’s easy to assume July is safe. School’s out, nobody’s coaching, what’s there to expire? Then August rolls around and a new assistant football coach’s concussion training lapsed in late June, three weeks before two-a-days even started. He didn’t know. Nobody flagged it. It just sat there, expired, waiting for someone to notice.
Nobody noticed because nobody was assigned to notice. It wasn’t on anyone’s calendar. It wasn’t anyone’s specific job. It was just a folder in a drawer, and drawers don’t send reminders.
Takeaway: Pull every coach’s certification and license expiration date this week, including bus driving re-certs, and put them on one single calendar. Not a filing cabinet. A calendar.
2. The assumption that someone else checked
Background checks are where this gets scary instead of just annoying. Every district has a policy. Almost every district assumes someone else is the one checking it against reality.
Picture a dad volunteering as an unpaid assistant for JV baseball, showing up every day for two months. Come May, someone finally asks whether his background check is on file. Athletics assumed the front office handled volunteers. The front office assumed HR handled anyone touching payroll, paid or not. He’d been coaching kids the whole spring with no background check at all, because two departments each assumed the other one owned it.
Nothing bad happened, this time. That’s not the point. The point is how normal that gap is in a building where the AD, the front office, and the district office all touch the same list of names but nobody’s been told they’re the one responsible for it.
Takeaway: Name one person, in writing, who owns background check verification for every adult on a field, paid or volunteer. If that’s not already spelled out at your school, get it in writing this month.
3. The habit before the system
Plenty of ADs run their compliance tracking out of a spreadsheet somebody built years ago. Coach name, certification type, issue date, expiration date, one row per person. It works, until it doesn’t. It gets updated in August during the crunch and then forgotten by October. By the following June, half the dates are stale and nobody finds out until a certification actually lapses.
We talk to ADs every week, and we hear the same story constantly. Someone built a spreadsheet in 2019. Nobody’s touched it since the person who built it left the district. The gap isn’t effort, it’s that a spreadsheet doesn’t tap anyone on the shoulder in July when something’s about to expire in August.
That’s part of why we built Bound to help ADs stay ahead of exactly this kind of thing, so the reminder shows up before the folder does, not after.
Takeaway: Pick one credential type this week, CPR, concussion training, bus driving re-cert, background checks, whatever scares you most, and set a recurring reminder thirty days before every expiration. Just one. Build the habit before you build the whole system.
One win at a time
Nobody needs to fix all of this before the first day of practice. Pick one. Maybe it’s just pulling the expiration dates onto a calendar this week, before a manila folder ever makes it to someone’s desk.
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