At the beginning of STA’s spring sports season, assistant athletic director Jack Garvin announced the athletic department’s new rules and regulations. These rules:

• require students to address their coaches as ‘coach’ and then their name
• prohibit students from parking in the teacher parking lot behind Goppert Center
• require the back doors of Goppert to be locked
• provide special locker rooms for teams to store their backpacks and netbooks during practices or home games.

The rules work to increase student safety and improve team relationships. Consistently breaking these rules can end in an student behavioral report.

“Obviously we’re not going to go dishing out SBRs,” athletic director Mark Hough said. “And you know right now we just [correct] it with a look.”

According to Hough, most of the rules are meant to protect the students.

“It’s nothing to be mean or to make a change just to make a change,” Hough said. “It’s really just to make sure that everybody’s safe and that their stuff is safe.”

According to Hough, Garvin met with each of the spring sport teams at the beginning of the season to announce the recent changes. According to junior lacrosse captain Lucy Edmonds, some of these policies, like the rule of addressing coaches only as ‘coach,’ are more difficult to adjust to than others.

“I would never not like lacrosse, but when Garvin was telling us all these rules, I was kind of annoyed just to hear that all of a sudden they were going to be more strict,” Edmonds said. “It kind of took away from the fun.”

This year marks the lacrosse team’s first year as an official STA sport. According to Hough, the new rules will be most difficult for the lacrosse team, because the sport has never been sponsored by STA before this year. However, he believes that it will improve the team dynamic and the relationships between athletes and coaches.

Varsity lacrosse coach Holly Ambrose feels that the new rule concerning how athletes address their coaches encourages students to be respectful.

“It’s a sign of respect, and it’s okay with me,” Ambrose said. “But it’s funny to have people call me [‘coach’].”

While Ambrose appreciates being addressed with respect, she does not believe the official change was necessary.

“I don’t think that it’s really changed any of the relationships or attitudes about playing or the girls’ attitudes or [coach Jessie Hanna and I’s] attitudes,” Ambrose said. “I think the girls of St. Teresa’s are very respectful anyway and so they follow the rules. There’s just not a whole lot of issues with that.”