No Coaches, No Community 

Volunteer coaches provide an essential service to NORD’s youth athletics programs. They dedicate their time without receiving wages while assuming significant responsibility for mentoring, supervising, and supporting children throughout the community. 

The fact that a coach is a volunteer rather than a paid City employee does not diminish the importance of the role. However, it does create a clear distinction between volunteer participation and City employment, particularly when it comes to protections, procedures, and accountability. 

Paid City employees and applicants for paid City employment are covered by established employment laws, nondiscrimination requirements, hiring procedures, and avenues for challenging employment decisions. NORD volunteer coaches generally do not have those same employment-law protections simply because they are serving in an unpaid volunteer capacity. 

For volunteer coaches, NORD has a written, outdated policy governing criminal background eligibility. However, volunteers do not have the same statutory employment framework as paid City employees to challenge whether the policy has been applied fairly, consistently, or without discrimination. 

This creates an important concern. A policy may establish eligibility guidelines, but the value of those guidelines depends on NORD applying them consistently to every applicant.  

In other words, any NORD volunteer policy should not only identify who may be disqualified but also provide accountability for how those decisions are made. Without the employment protections and formal remedies available to paid City employees, volunteer applicants may have fewer clearly defined avenues to question a decision, obtain an explanation, or require NORD to demonstrate that its published standards were followed. 

Because volunteer coaches are entrusted with access to children and youth programs, appropriate background checks are both understandable and necessary. At the same time, public safety concerns should not eliminate the need for fairness, consistency, transparency, and accountability. If NORD establishes specific background-screening guidelines, volunteers should reasonably expect those guidelines to be applied as written and equally to all applicants. 

We welcome and fully support policies designed to protect the safety and well-being of the children participating in NORD programs. We also welcome policies that protect the volunteers who dedicate their time and service to these programs. These should not be viewed as competing priorities.  

No coaches mean no community-based youth sports program. Volunteers make these programs possible. Their unpaid status should not mean that eligibility decisions can be made arbitrarily or outside of NORD’s own established guidelines. If NORD relies upon a written Volunteer Policy to determine eligibility, there should also be a meaningful process to ensure that the policy is consistently followed, upheld, and applied fairly.