08/03/23- Important Changes in the KHSAA Online School Subdomain for 2023-24

August 4, 2023 Athletic Department Blog Updates

Good morning. On behalf of the entire staff, it is our hope that many of you as building and athletic administrators are back and ready to go after the dead period and getting into these first few days of practice. Our golf teams have already begun play and it is right around the corner in the rest of the fall sports.

SYSTEM OVERVIEW REMINDER- COACHING DATA

• Please continue to contact Rob Catron at the KHSAA (rcatron@khsaa.org) or by phone, 859-299-5472 ext 249 and he can assist with your technology needs using our system.
• It is probably worth reminding everyone that we have provided a robust system to track things for your coaches, and in many cases, the data in that system is the only authenticated way to track requirements.
• What you may not realize is how frequently we are asked for specific information about coaches, be it specific or en masse, and we try and respond to those requests, particularly from media outlets, despite not addressing the technicalities of open records.
• While you may be choosing to monitor coaching requirements in a variety of ways, if inquiries to our office are answered with missing or inaccurate data from you not using the system to record data, the requesters are free to draw conclusions that these requirements are either not met, or not monitored. And they frequently do, with or without calling you to verify things.
• The required safety course (per 160.445) and rules clinic attendance will be completely accurate in our system as they are recorded in real-time.
• And while it is technically your discretion where and how you are tracking CPR/FIRST AID/AED training, Coaching Education, and other requirements, those are the obvious hot-button issues of most of the records requests into this office. Obviously, the best option is to continually use the one-stop shop that has been developed over more than a decade of work by our staff, our developer and our schools.
• We fully expect as a follow-up to media accounts during 2022-23, routine requests for sports coaching data, particularly around the safety-related requirements.
• In addition, we expect your membership application to be (again) a subject of inquiries into how strongly you are adhering to state guidelines, you may want to be sure yours is current at https://khsaa.org/general/resources/past-membership-applications/.

SYSTEM DATA CHANGES FOR 2023-24

• This year, there have been a few minor changes to the required KHSAA online roster and the school management system.
  • The first important change is that when any user signed or signs in after Wednesday, July 5th they are now required to reset their personal password.  Again, this is all users.
  • Following that step, they will be presented with a grid of questions to fill out regarding ethnicity in an attempt to better continue to gather data to focus association efforts. Many of today’s coaches (and officials) are unaware that the KHSAA operates under a decades-long Federal Court Order requiring ethnic diversity in its officials, its board, and its staff. As such, it is important to know this data about our constituency to better guide future planning in areas of need.
    • This data collection is the next in a line of steps to also address continual inquiries about the different populations in our coaching community and attempts to better serve our student groups by being aware of this data.
    • This step was taken several years ago with our officials and has certainly helped in data collection and identification of needed areas for recruitment and retention.

ROSTERS

• Rosters were rolled from the previous year, and may now be edited for the coming seasons as well as sport and sport-activity offerings PROVIDED THEY HAVE BEEN INITIALIZED BY THE ATHLETIC DIRECTOR.
• Though there are minor enhancements being fine-tuned, there is no reason for a delay in entering and editing rosters.
• We will again conduct a thorough review of the system through demonstrations at the advanced athletic administrators’ workshop. In addition, staff will be available for specific questions at the regional meetings starting later this month, and is available to assist at any time.
• One note for the future is to remember not to delete seniors once they are finished. This situation was executed in a couple of our schools and we were able to restore that historical data for later use. What some do not realize is the intricate connection between rosters, scoreboards, schedules, statistics and statistical leaders, so data manipulation needs to be avoided and simply rely on automation.
• IMPORTANT NOTE:
  STUDENTS MAY NOT PARTICIPATE IN INTERSCHOLASTIC COMPETITION (including scrimmages and contests), AND SUCH SCRIMMAGES AND CONTESTS CANNOT BE HELD BY MEMBER SCHOOLS WITHOUT A VALID ROSTER BEING ONLINE! The KHSAA system (which is the ONLY system for roster and schedule entry that meets KHSAA rules and requirements in all sports), is now back online after our summer roster rollover process.
  

GETTING STARTED FOR 2023-24

• Here are the recommended steps for getting started for 2023-2024 if you have not done so already:
  1. Login to your KHSAA Member High School Account on the school login system (https://schools.khsaa.org/)
  2. Go to your Maintain Member School Information (non-personnel) page located in the Primary School Database Operations section of links (direct link http://schools.khsaa.org/schools_update/).
     1. Ensure that all of your sports offerings for 2023-2024 are correct as of that date – especially your Fall offerings. Feel free to update as student interest changes and new offerings are added or outdated ones need to be removed.
     2. Make any necessary changes to both the School Information and the Sports Participation Information grids. Note that the School Information data is what populates our public-facing school directory.
     3. Proceed to your Maintain Overall Athletic Roster page located in the Maintain/Print Rosters section of links (direct link http://schools.khsaa.org/athletes/) and review your entire athlete list.
     4. Initialize your rosters. If you have not taken this critical step, you will see an indicator message in the top right corner under “YOUR MESSAGES”. Click on that message to open a short view of the message, and click on the link in that message that says “Click here to review and initialize your roster”. Until your overall athletic roster is initialized, you nor your coaches (if you allow them) can enter/edit specific team rosters.
• One additional note concerning rosters, specifically related to adding a new athlete to your school.  The process for adding a new athlete to your school has reverted back to the way it was prior to the pandemic. With the majority of the impact of SB128 complete, coaches will again have the ability (if you permit them access) to add new athletes from the Maintain Specific Team Rosters Page (https://schools.khsaa.org/roster/).

ANNUAL ROLLOVER

• Over the summer we have:
  1. Promoted all of your athletes a grade level from last year.
  2. Removed (graduated) all of your seniors so they are no longer on your school’s list, and
  3. Cleared out all Freshman and JV rosters assignments, leaving only your last year’s varsity roster assignments intact (as you can see in the list). i.e. If there was a junior on the varsity baseball roster last year, they will be a senior this year on the same varsity baseball roster.
  4. For those districts that approved the implementation of SB128 in 2021 for 2021-22 ONLY, the designations of those players who were approved have to remain logged in the data and their status will still be listed on the Maintain Overall Athletic Roster until those students graduate.

ADDITIONAL ROSTER NOTES (VARSITY)

• You have the option, at this initialization stage to clear out all of last year’s varsity roster assignments as well (thus “starting from scratch” on all three roster levels – not only Freshman and JV Rosters). This process is non-reversible, so please make 100% certain of this before you do so.

FURTHER ASSISTANCE

• Our IT Director, Rob Catron, has created a 5-minute instructional video that describes the roster initialization process. The video is located at https://youtu.be/O5D6RIWtQZE and is embedded at the end of this post. Though the title of the video is 2016-2017, the information in the video continues to be accurate. 
• This and many other training videos which will both help guide new Athletic Directors and serve as a refresher for veterans can be found on one Youtube AD playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxwXJEK795gTugQTJ-cyIHbGF-6d6E2Cm
• Please contact Rob at the KHSAA (rcatron@khsaa.org) or by phone, 859-299-5472 ext 249 and he can assist with your technology needs using our system.

– KHSAA –

The KHSAA staff routinely publishes blog posts to better communicate with its various constituencies and the public. For a list of those blogs, go to http://khsaa.org/news-stats-pubs/sports-blogs/