(Radio Iowa) – A coach who’s also a member of the Iowa House is proposing an expansion of the time coaches are not allowed to have contact with Iowa students who participate in high school sports. Representative Skyler Wheeler, a former baseball player at Northwestern College, is head coach of the baseball team at Unity Christian High School in Orange City.

“Currently right now in the summer when baseball and softball (seasons) finish, you have a week off where you can have no contact as coaches with athletes,” Wheeler said. “It’s basically in place to allow parents and student athletes to take a trip together. They’re not going to miss any practices or things like that.” That seven-day period starts on a Sunday in late July and Wheeler’s bill would extend it for three more days.

The bill also calls for a one-week “no contact” period in November, a no-contact period from December 25th to January 1st and a seven day “spring break” that would give students a break from all sports. “I think this would be very popular with parents,” Wheeler said. “It may not be super popular with some coaches or some sports, but I think as we move this conversation forward, we’ll be able to get to a good spot with it.”

The bill easily cleared the House Education Committee last week on a 20-to-three vote, but not after some push back from Representative Daniel Gosa. He’s a former Davenport School Board member who has coached his son’s Little League baseball team. “November would be a huge problem for miscellaneous programs as teams that make playoffs in football would overlap with wrestling and cause major conflicts,” Gosa said. “December, the middle of the wrestling season, that would be bad news for, you know, giving wrestlers seven days off with weight management and endurance would drop.”

The non-contact and no practice policies outlined in the bill would also apply to theater productions, cheerleading, show choir and band. Wheeler says if you were to poll the students, they’d probably say they’d like more free time between sports seasons. “One of my schools won the state football championship this last year. The very next week they were playing basketball,” Wheeler said. “They are a decent basketball team. They almost got knocked off by probably one of the worst teams in their class simply because there was no time off, they were exhausted and they went right into basketball.”

Wheeler says the bill may be altered to line up better with winter sports like basketball and wrestling, but Wheeler says the goal is to get a vote in the full House on a uniform time-off-from-sports policy that gives kids a break. “If I take a whole off of sports and my team is practicing…from a coach’s perspective, that kid’s going to sit,” Wheeler said. “They’re not going to play that kid for a while and he’s going to get rusty.”

A designated “family week” started in the summer of 2021 to give Iowa high school students, coaches and teachers a week away from practicing for sports or band.