Offseason Practice Rules

NEPSAC is committed to the philosophy of encouraging student athletes to play multiple sports. NEPSAC’s Out of Season Coaching Policy was promulgated to support this commitment. The interpretation of, and compliance with, this policy shall be in both letter and spirit.

Purpose:

•To allow coaches to provide informal individualized extra help for student athletes much in the same way a teacher may provide extra help for a student academically.

•To provide a more “level playing field” between member schools with respect to athletics and admissions.

•To define allowable out of season contact between coaches and athletes that is consistent with the aforementioned philosophy of encouraging multi-sport

participation, which is in no way intended to create an incentive for student athletes to opt out of other sports in order to work with coaches out of season in a single sport.

Policy:

NEPSAC prohibits institutional support for out of season coaching of a school’s student athletes by a school’s coaches. Schools shall not provide release time, credit, or uniforms out of season to their student athletes. Coaches shall not coach varsity athletes on nonschool teams during the school year. Coaches are prohibited from coaching student athletes outside of their sport’s assigned season unless otherwise specified below.

Allowable Contacts:

1. A coach may provide occasional skill oriented informal training/instruction to up to three student athletes at a time outside of their sport’s assigned season. Regularly scheduled supervised workouts are not within the spirit of this policy. This informal time may not take place during regularly scheduled afternoon program time at your school.  A coach may not directly or indirectly require a student athlete to participate in such training/instruction. Schools are encouraged to monitor this contact in order to make sure that it is informal as well as reasonable in amount so as to be consistent with the letter and spirit of this policy.

2. Summer coaching is allowed. 

3 A coach may coach his/her own child out of season.

4. Coaches shall not coach varsity athletes and/or newly enrolled potential varsity athletes on non-school teams during the school year.

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