Sleep Research Shows Student-Athletes Benefit From

Later Start
theatlantic.com /education/archive/2017/04/how-school-start-times-affect-high-school-athletics/522537/

How School Start Times Affect High-School Athletics

Catching more sleep could help student-athletes catch more touchdowns, but some still argue sports schedules
are a reason against moving back the first bell.

Shannon Stapleton / Reuters

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On March 13, the board of education in Sag Harbor, New York, a wealthy town on the eastern end of Long
Island, sat down to discuss what time local schools should start. The principal question in front of the board was
simple: Should Pierson Middle-High School, which is located in Suffolk County, New York, maintain its 7:35 a.m.
start time or push back the opening bell to allow students more sleep in the morning?

Later start times have long been a pet cause for the board member Susan Lamontagne, a health advocate and
Sag Harbor parent. In 2013, Lamontagne founded the Long Island chapter of Start School Later, a national
organization that lobbies school districts to alter their schedules. A year later, she led a successful effort to push
back start times at Pierson by 10 minutes. Unsatisfied with that modest change, she ran for the board in 2016
promising even later bells.

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Why School Should Start Later in the Morning

Now she was again bringing the cause to Sag Harbor, and this
meeting was the first step toward change. She knew there would be
resistancethere always wasbut she hoped Sag Harbor residents
could get on board with an 8 a.m. start time. That was earlier than the
pediatrician-recommended 8:30 a.m., but at least it was later than
7:35 a.m.

But when it came time for public input, Don OBrien made it clear that
resistance to a 25-minute delay would be hard to overcome.

You are putting our student-athletes at a disadvantage by having them get out at 3 oclock, OBrien, a father of
two Sag Harbor elementary-school students and a varsity soccer coach in a nearby town, told the board. Every
single contest that we play next year will be affected by a 3 oclock time. Every practice and every single game.

Another Sag Harbor parent, Rich Perello, took the microphone and decried what he saw as the districts apathy
toward athletics. It seems like theres a disconnect here between the people who are making the decisions and
the kids who actually want to play sports, he said.

In OBrien and Perellos view, Piersons athletic programs wouldnt survive delayed start times. Sag Harbor is
located at the east end of Long Island, and its student-athlete must often travel long distances to games in other
districts. Later dismissal, the parents worried, could make getting to games on time more difficult. Plus, OBrien
and Perello pointed out, Pierson students share some sports teams with neighboring high schools, and
coordinating practice could be tough if those schools start and end at different times.

But Lamontagne, who views start times as a student-health issue, is just as fervent about her cause as OBrien
and Perello are about theirs.

I have been involved in this issue for many, many years, and I have yet to see around the country a community
that raised this issue where the sports community didnt come out and panic, she told me. The pattern is that
they panic every time, the concerns are the same, and every single time, the concerns get addressed.

It turns out that community life revolves around public schools rather than vice versa.

The debate in Sag Harbor mirrors similar conversations in districts across the country. Hundreds of schools in 44
U.S. States have already delayed start times in response to sleep-science research. But in more than a few
other districts, attempts to push back the opening bells have failed because of the kinds of concerns being
voiced on Long Island.

On one side are parents who point to extensive research on sleep cycles of adolescents, effects of sleep on
academic performance, and the safety risks associated with sleep deprivation. On the other are those who are
worried about what changing start times would mean to their everyday livesbeginning with high-school sports.
But given the startling correlation between poor sleep and athletic injuries in teenagers, perhaps those two
camps have more in common than they realize.

***

The research on school start times is unequivocal: Teenagers sleep cycles differ from those of adults. While an
adult (or a young child) may have no trouble dozing off at 10 p.m., adolescent bodies arent wired to fall asleep
before 11 p.m. If students are asked to wake up at 6 a.m. for a 7:30 a.m. first bell, they will struggle to record the
recommended eight to 10 hours of sleepor anything close to it.

This sleep deprivation has consequences. Studies have shown teenagers perform better in school when they are

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more rested. Students who sleep more are also less prone to depression, less vulnerable to car accidents, and
more likely to wear seat belts and bicycle helmets.

Some parents figure students whose days begin later will simply stay up later at night, but surveys have found
that students sleep considerably more when their schools start later. Everywhere from Boston to Minnesota,
districts that have delayed start times have found decreases in tardiness.

Erratic, irregular sleep patterns and insufficient or inadequate amounts of sleep for anyone, but especially
adolescents, is damaging, said Amy Wolfson, a sleep researcher at Loyola University Maryland.

Armed with a wealth of evidence, both the American Medical Association and the American Academy of
Pediatrics have formally recommended that middle and high schools start no earlier than 8:30 a.m.

Still, delayed start times find enemies across the country. Some parents worry that later start times will make it
more difficult for them to get to work. Others protest that they need their teenagers around in the afternoon to
look after their younger children. Or that high-schoolers wont be able to get jobs if they get out later. The
prospect of added bus costsmoving start times can disrupt the equilibrium between elementary-, middle-, and
high-school transportation schedulesare another consideration.

Though these issues are complicated and vary greatly by district, delayed-start time advocates point out that
plenty of districts have effectively worked around them.

Everybody thinks that the way they do it in their district is the only way and the best way to do it, said Terra
Ziporyn Snider, the executive director of Start School Later. But all you have to do is step outside your own
school district and you start to realize that people run schools at all different times, all over the country, all over
the world. It turns out that community life revolves around public schools rather than vice versa.

High-school sports represent one of the most consistent roadblocks barring change. In almost every town where
this issue is raised, at least one naysayer worries that pushing the school day deeper into the afternoon will
mean shorter practices and irreconcilable scheduling conflicts with other schools.

If you really put any value on high-school sports, I think the negative really outweighs the benefits, said Perello,
one of the Sag Harbor parents, acknowledging that academics should always come first.

But do later start times always have to come at the expense of sports?

At Sharon High School in Massachusetts, where the start time was bumped in 2010 from 7:25 a.m. to 8:05 a.m.,
Principal Jose Libano simply asked competing schools if they could schedule games slightly later. When
coaches at his school worried that extra warm-up time gave opposing teams an advantage, he told opponents
they couldnt arrive for games in Sharon until students were out of class. On the road, Sharon officials warned
referees players might need a few extra minutes of preparation before starting the games.

In Barrington, Illinois, where the school board recently approved an 8:30 a.m. start time for the local high school,
the athletic director Mike Obsuszt isnt too concerned about the impact on his department. Maybe outdoor
practices will be shorter, and maybe more games will be end early due to darkness, but the teams will find a way
to adapt.

If theres a group of people who know how to adjust to change, it would be coaches, Obsuszt said. Even
though there may be coaches who dont prefer, personally, the later time, they will adjust.

The science and the evidence is so clear, that if I did nothing at all and just continued on with the same start
times, I was hurting kids.

The change in start times in Barrington will surely affect the longtime softball coach Perry Peterson. He might
have to re-align his schedule at the local middle school, where he teaches physical education, and hell likely
have to cope with less time for batting practice once he arrives at the softball field. Still, citing his confidence in
sleep research and the school boards decision-making, he said hes not concerned and can make it work.

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If students or parents worry that these changes could put Barrington at a competitive disadvantage, Peterson
has a persuasive retort: Last years conference champion was a school that starts at 8 a.m. regularly and 9:45
a.m. on Wednesdays.

***

Though most research on the impact of adolescent sleep concerns academic performance, theres ample
evidence that a restful nightand the quicker reaction times and sharper concentration that come with it
improves athletic performance as well.

Numerous professional sports teams have begun to view better sleep as a competitive advantage. The Seattle
Seahawks track players sleep through electronic wristbands, while the Boston Red Sox offer a sleep room
inside Fenway Park. NBA teams optimize flight schedules to make time for sleep, and players have taken to
napping before games. A 2011 Stanford study found that college basketball players ran faster and shot more
accurately after getting more sleep.

And a 2014 paper published by the orthopedic surgeon Matthew Milewski and colleagues noted a correlation
that should trouble any high-school athletic director.

In a study of 160 student athletes at a middle/high school in Los Angeles, Milewski found that sleep deprivation
was the single best predictor of athletic injuries in adolescents. Students who averaged less than eight hours of
sleep were 1.7 times more likely to suffer an injury than those who averaged eight or more hours.

The finding surprised Milewski at first, until he mulled it over a bit more. Soon, the idea that sleep-deprived
teenagers might be prone to more injury risklikely due to dulled reaction time or lack of alertnessseemed like
common sense.

All of our moms or parents told us once upon a time to eat your vegetables, eat the right foods, dont eat too
much junk food, make sure you get enough sleep or youre not going to do well in school. And thats also true for
sports, Milewski said. The nice thing is, with a little bit of education, this could improve. It doesnt take much.
Kids need to go to sleep.

***

Sports have always been important for Jeremy Ray, the superintendent of the school districts in Biddeford and
Dayton, Maine. Early in his career he worked as a basketball official, before spending three years as a P.E.
teacher and one as a high-school athletic director. Now, his office in Biddeford is decorated with Red Sox
memorabilia.

But Ray is also well-read on school start-time research, and when Tracey Collins, head of the Start School Later
chapter in southern Maine, reached out to him in late 2015 about moving his high schools first bell, he was
immediately onboard. The more he learned about start-time research, the more convinced he was that Biddeford
High Schools 7:45 start was far too early.

The science and the evidence is so clear, that if I did nothing at all and just continued on with the same start
times, I was hurting kids, Ray recently told me.

So Ray and Collins began a meticulous outreach campaign. They presented the science to the local school
board, hosted a meeting of board members from around the region, held public forums and spoke personally
with opponents.

Ray knew that supportor at least tolerancefrom the sports community would go a long way toward making a
change. So he asked Biddefords athletic director, Dennis Walton, to map out a full school year of delayed start
times and determine if thered be time for practice and how often athletes would need to be dismissed from
school early.

Waltons finding: The athletic department would have little trouble adjusting to a new schedule. Teams would still

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be able to practice before the sun went down, and only rarely would students have to leave a few minutes before
the final bell to get to games and meets.

Coaches had some questions, but Walton assured them their seasons would proceed, more or less, as usual.
Ray spoke to Biddefords football coach, explaining the link between sleep deprivation and athletic injuries, and
convinced him that sacrificing a few minutes of practice was more than worthwhile.

Angry opposition to delayed start times in Biddeford never emerged, and neighboring towns joined the
movement. On April 6, 2016, school boards in Biddeford, Dayton, and Sacowhich share a Career and
Technical Education school and therefore coordinate all schedulingtogether voted to push back their opening
bells.

Itll definitely kill the sports.

The new schedule took effect in August, and though its too early to fully analyze the effect of later start times,
the change has so far corresponded with increased attendance, decreased tardiness, and fewer visits to the
nurses office.

Walton, the Biddeford athletic director, often hears from colleagues in other districts who are curious about
delayed start times. His message to them is simple.

Its like anything else: You adjust, Walton said. And if what were being told is that academically kids are going
to benefit across the board from later starts, then I think that you have to say that takes precedence over the
extra 20 minutes of practice time.

***

Sag Harbors start-time debate doesnt look like itll cool down anytime soon. OBrien spoke in front of the Board
of Education again on April 3, presenting a list of reasons why delayed start times at Pierson are unproductive
and untenable. He and Perello promise to continue fighting against a schedule change.

Itll definitely kill the sports, Perello said. Shared sports definitely, and itll be a hardship on regular sports.

Lamontagne doesnt know exactly what sports in Sag Harbor will look like if high school starts at 8 a.m. instead
of 7:35, but she strongly believes her hometown can find a solution.

Im confident that we can make the move and address sports issues, because sports matter, she said. They
always say its not logistically possible, and guess what? It always works out.

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