A regular day for Amanda Waters used to mean non-stop movement. As the athletic director at Carlsbad High School, she rarely had a quiet moment when working on the campus with almost 2,500 students.
Her days are much different now, but just because she can’t be around her students doesn’t mean they aren’t on her mind. This week she organized and hosted a video conference with athletic directors from San Diego and across the country with the hope of trying to share ideas on how to help students not feel completely isolated from their school community.
“I know there has been a lot of buzz around; I think everybody is kind of wondering what do we do,” Waters said following the first meeting.
Right now school districts across San Diego are hoping to return to class at some point in April, but with so much changing day by day that did not stop Waters from using the meeting to start preparing for the long term.
“We talked about doing Zoom meetings with your athletes and our coaches, and how do you handle banquets and senior nights and all of those things that are coming up,” she said.
This whole idea grew from a series of tweets she posted last week about how she and other local athletic directors should use the downtime. Ira Childress, who is an athletic director at a school in Miami and follows Waters on social media, got in touch with her to help collaborate with her on organizing the online conference.
Andre Clarke from San Pasqual High School was one of the other local ADs who took part in the event.
“Being stuck in a state of uncertainty without an obvious path to getting back to normalcy has been tough. I left the call feeling a lot better about what I could do from home,” Clark commented.
The meeting brought together over 40 athletic directors from five states, but there are hopes to have that grow much larger. Waters took to Twitter to announce that they will be doing the meetings every Wednesday for the foreseeable future.
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