Evaluation of the "Roaming Locker Room Coach" Poll

A reader sent a comment about the recent poll which was essentially on "Coaches patrolling the Gym Locker room when we were in school".

He wrote -

 "I've been expecting an editorial wrap-up on the locker-room poll. Any thoughts? Surely there's something to be learned from all those votes. That's a pretty wide range, 14 who didn't care if the coach monitored the room when they were naked, versus 1 who apparently felt violated by a watchful coach."

 My feelings are this.

 The count of readers votes cast on this poll clearly totaled 34. During the week-long period the voting was open, we had 9,350 site visits by our readers. We can't actually assume that all readers noticed the Poll, since about 40% of our readers visit using a personal device such as a phone. I am going to exclude tablets, since my tablet allows and defaults to a full site view. I presume that might be the case with most other PC and Tablet based visitors. So lets just take 40% off the 9,350 count, which result to 5,610 readers who likely saw the poll.  Of those 5,610 we are going to credit 34 of them as the pool of our opinioned voters. This is a .006% voter turn-out. I feel this value is entirely too low to extrapolate any sensible tally for our readers opinions on the matter.

 Therefore all you will get now is my opinion. In my Junior High School days, our coach only managed the locker room during the first two weeks. He reminded kids to be sure to shower use soap, and before getting dressed to use deodorant, so we would not smell offensive when we go to our next classes. So it was more of a hygiene thing. I have no awareness today if he popped in much any other time during our showers or dressing.

 I honestly did peek some at the various guys around me or while in the showers, all for the sake of scientific study in human development of course.....But ANY WAY,  that brings me to my next point.

 I feel most teens are pretty well absorbed in themselves and their buddies. The various social aspects of teen-age life are developing, so pick something the boys would be doing aside from dressing and showering: chatting, joking, horseplay or even towel-slapping butts are some things on the agenda for just about every boy in the lockers. I paid no attention to my coach in the lockers, unless he would have walked right up to me. For the most part it was a rushed event, required of us to clean-up and get on to our next class.

 Our coach did have a window in his office that allowed his view into the lockers, but I don't ever remember obsessing if he was looking at our little pricks. So I feel the results of the poll relate very closely to my own experiences.

 Of our 20 respondents who were okay with a coach in the lockers, this accounts for close to 60%. We had 9 respondents who said their coach had a window, and honestly this question was neither approval of, or rejection of coach having the window. Just a factoid. We did have 5 people who said they were opposed to coach viewing the kids in the locker room. This may indeed be our most valued and correct opinion collected in this poll. They account for 14% of our voters who opposed coach in the lockers, which is a very low count. If we had 30 boys in the lockers, 4 of them would be shy for coach. The remaining 26 cared less.

Fortunately there were no reports of a Penn State type of scandal in the locker rooms by any of our readers, so lets hope everyone survived safe, happy and unmarred by locker rooms, showering, or their coach being present upon occasion.

 

Anonymous