By CHUCK SOUDERS
Sports Writer
chuck_s@newsitem.com
When Gerald Nesvold became Shamokin Area's superintendent in 1994, he was given a directive by the school board at that time which was perhaps a little surprising.
"When I was hired, the board said stop the redshirting," Nesvold said. "It was a very easy thing for me to do because I didn't agree with it. They felt the same way I did. They were the ones that brought it up. Kids were getting A's in math and then taking it over again. It's terrible. It teaches a kid that you don't have to work for a year."
When Nesvold set about implementing changes, there were naysayers.
"I heard from a lot of very prominent local people, former coaches and administrators, and they warned me it would be the end of athletics at Shamokin," Nesvold said. "Nonsense."
Nesvold said he later modified his stance when the board changed hands and wanted to bring the practice back.
"Years later, some board members were elected on the plank that they were going to re-institute it, so I did some soul-searching how to justify it," he explained. "We came up with a plan in junior high where a student could not repeat any course in which he or she got higher than a specific grade. I think it was 70 or 75. But then we had some students who just failed to schedule a specific course, so they could take it the second year. I found that in the redshirt process, nobody was ever truly happy and nobody was really ticked off."
According to Nesvold, once he and the board implemented strict no-redshirt rules at the secondary level, the emphasis shifted to the elementary level, where then Elementary Principal Ned Sodrick, who later succeeded Nesvold as superintendent, had to deal with it.
"Ned really enforced it at the elementary level," Nesvold said. "It (holding a child back) had to be justified."
According to Sodrick, the argument over whether or not to hold kids back seems to be a never-ending one, and one that has more than a few minefields.
"At one time, we might have been holding 12 to 15 kids back a year, most on parental request," Sodrick said. "In some cases, they were right. In some cases, it helped the student academically as well as athletically."
But there were also cases when it didn't pan out as hoped.
"Some kids kind of went south on us," he said. "Eighth grade was at the middle school back then, and some of the kids who stayed back kind of became the cock of the walk the next year. We had one kid who was on the honor roll one year, stayed back and almost flunked the next year, taking the same courses."