The North Carolina High School Athletic Association (NCHSAA) is placing an emphasis on sportsmanship and encouraging schools to be ejection-free.

The NCHSAA has an ejection and disqualification code that all coaches and student-athletes are required to follow.

Ejections are for:

• Fighting
• Leaving the bench area
• Flagrant contact
• Biting
• Taunting, baiting or spitting toward an opponent or official
• Profanity
• Obscene gestures
• Disrespectfully addressing an official

Disqualifications are for penalties such as two yellow cards or technical fouls and other unsportsmanlike penalties that are not listed above. If a player or coach is ejected for fighting, he or she must miss the rest of the contest and the four games following. An exception is made in football when fighting ejections receive a two-game suspension. All other ejections are for the rest of the contest and the two games that follow. If a player or coach is disqualified they are not allowed to finish the game.

NCHSAA Assistant Commissioner Mark Dreibelbis said that most of the schools double the penalties, but it is up to the school district to go above what the NCHSAA requires.

Anytime an athlete or coach is disqualified and or ejected, he or she must take a STAR Sportsmanship course before returning to activity. Anytime a student-athlete is ejected for fighting, the head coach must take the NFHS Teaching and Modeling Behavior Course before coaching again.

“We’ve had the STAR program for five years and the teaching and modeling course for three years,” Dreibelbis said. “We wanted to get the coaches’ attention and tell them that they are responsible for their student-athletes.”

The NCHSAA tracks the number of ejections and disqualifications. Dreibelbis said that as soon as an ejection is recorded in their system, it automatically gets sent to the athletic director and principal by e-mail. There is also a follow-up e-mail that the administrators receive from Dreibelbis especially if the ejection involves fighting.

“There is no place for fighting in academic extracurricular activities. Coaches are role models,” Dreibelbis said.

The NCHSAA also requires each student-athlete and parent to sign a sportsmanship pledge once a year. The coaches are also required to sign a pledge.

“The pledges are a good benchmark,” Dreibelbis said. “They are great for preseason meetings to set the expectations.”

A pledge template is available on the NCHSAA Web site, but schools are encouraged to customize it to that institution. The basis of the pledge is that the signee, whether the individual is a student-athlete, parent of a student-athlete or coach, is a role model and that there are certain expectations to being a role model.

Another way that the NCHSAA recognizes good sportsmanship is by awarding framed certificates to schools that have been ejection-free. To take it a step further, at the end of each season, if a team has been ejection-free, it can nominate three student-athletes who exemplified good sportsmanship and leadership. These students are awarded a t-shirt with a NCHSAA logo framed by the words “Character,” “Respect,” “Citizenship” and “Integrity.”

“I love the logo,” Dreibelbis said. “By giving students a shirt with the logo, they are likely to be approached by other students about how they got the shirt. The response should be ‘I got it for being a leader on my volleyball [or whatever sport] team.”