The Sports Innovation Institute has partnered with the Center for Sports Transformation since January 2022 on a wide variety of initiatives to support and build the sports leadership capacity in communities at all levels of youth sports using the long-term program development model (LTPD) framework. One of our first projects was to examine the durability of high school athletic directors in the state of Indiana. Our sports data analytics students, led by Kshaun Kapoor, collected and analyzed data on athletic director turnover.
The objective of the survival analysis is to ascertain the average tenure of athletic directors and the factors that had a significant impact on their tenure.
Data Collection
The IHSAA has a directory of all its member schools which contains information about each school, their respective district, conference, enrollment, sports, Athletic Directors (AD) and coaches. These directories are updated every year. For this study, the time period under consideration was from 2010-2020. The data was stored in PDF files and was manually extracted into Microsoft Excel to create a database that contained information about the tenure of each Athletic Director and the number of years they were in the post. The data was censored to compensate for the schools whose information was not available for the period of the study, i.e., those schools whose athletic directors were unknown for any year between 2010-2020. A total of 1,145 observations were made over the ten-year period at the 400+ IHSAA schools. Only 28 observations were censored due to insufficient data, yielding a total of 1,117 observations.
Athletic Director Survival Analysis
Only 84 athletic directors held the AD position at the same school for all 10 years (7.3%). In contrast, 315 athletic directors left after one year (27.5%). The Kaplan-Meier curve was used to estimate the probability of an event occurring for a specific number of years. It shows the probability that an athletic director will remain in the position up to a certain number of years. In this analysis, the curve showed a median survival time of three years.
Cox regression (or proportional hazards regression) is a method for investigating the effect of several variables upon the time a specified event takes to happen. In this study, we looked at variables such as gender and school size (enrollment). We found the following significant relationships:
- Female athletic directors were 1.2 times more likely than males to turnover at each year.
- Athletic directors at smaller enrollment schools (less than 300 enrollment) were 1.4 times more likely to turnover at each year than schools with the largest enrollments (900+ enrollment).
Implications
The high school athletic director is an incredibly important position in each community, and a variety of stakeholder groups need to invest in finding solutions to the high rate of turnover in this profession. It is difficult for athletic directors to pursue long-term program development when they are in the position for such a short period of time. Placing the onus for sports leadership in communities on the athletic director position creates a significant workload, difficult to meet expectations, and limited capacity for changing structures and processes.
The Center for Sports Transformation is reimagining youth sports leadership through communities of practice across the youth sports ecosystem. The development of localized youth sports leadership roles adopting LTPD principles should increase the total capacity for more and better sports experiences across the community, helping to relieve the incredible time pressures and burnout rates faced by those in the high school athletic director position.
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