Two years ago Mika Ryan took over as head coach of the High School South girls’ basketball team with high expectations.
“I saw the opportunity to be competitive,” she told the News in a 2013 interview. “I’m a very competitive person by nature. We don’t even talk about winning-losing records. I just want us to compete and be the best we can be every time we step on the floor. I felt like I would have that opportunity at South.”
A North Carolina native, Ryan played basketball at the University of North Carolina. She became an assistant coach at the University of Virginia, where she also met her future husband, Pat Ryan. The couple moved to New Jersey when Pat became president of Hopewell Valley Community Bank. She coached at the College of New Jersey for nine years, then left to raise her three daughters.
But she was lured back to coaching, first at Princeton Day School and then at South. “I enjoy this level because I enjoy this age group,” she said of high school coaching in the 2013 interview. “It’s coaching really at its purest form. You get to teach and coach. It’s really a nice position.”
But something changed in the course of her two years at the Pirates’ helm, and she resigned from South at the end of this season. As she explained in an op-ed published in the Times of Trenton on April 30, excerpted below, the age of helicopter parents and over-scheduled kids has taken its toll on the nature of high school sports — and coaching those sports.
“When I began my fifth season as a girls’ high school basketball coach,” Ryan wrote in her op ed. “I never imagined it would end with my resignation. However, I increasingly found myself walking into practices and games with the unsettled feeling that I was failing my players. Teaching skills accumulated over a long career no longer seemed relevant.
“In a season that brought me to my emotional knees, it seemed I needed to get my hearing checked.
“What?? You’re not coming to our game Friday? You’re staying home to rest for SATs on Saturday?? There was nothing wrong with my hearing. This dinosaur was not afraid to adapt, but at that moment, I had never felt so disconnected.”
Ryan continued: “Nothing could have prepared me for how dramatically the landscape of sports had changed in the decade since our youngest daughter graduated from high school.
“I arrived on the high school scene to find varsity sports inundated with micromanaging parents who campaigned for their children via e-mail, texts, and conversations with any administrator willing to listen. These same parents were ready to run interference at the first hint of a problem, lobby for playing time, and coach from the bleachers.
“Particularly discouraging were the parents and student-athletes who equated the opportunity of representing one’s school at the varsity level as just another activity on a laundry list of activities used to pad the college resume. Seemingly under pressure to do everything, student-athletes hustled out of the gym, stressed and sleep-deprived, yet moving full speed ahead to whatever was next on their schedule.
“The increasing significance of non-school sponsored sports teams was disruptive. It was not unusual for a student-athlete to miss multiple practices or games for non-school sponsored tournaments in another sport. Meanwhile, lost in the desire to catch that college coach’s eye was the physical toll it was taking on young bodies and the increased exposure to injury due to fatigue and stress.”
But she concluded with a positive note, that not all parents and students fit this new mold of high school athlete:
“This ‘diary’ is not meant to paint with a broad brush every parent as a micromanager and every student-athlete as entitled and overscheduled. During the past five years, I’ve met some special parents and their wonderful teenage daughters,” she wrote.
