"Positive Coaching Alliance has allowed us, as a school, to think about issues of integrity and good conduct throughout our community and beyond athletics. I can't tell you how many times I've heard reference to our partnership in student, department, and faculty meetings. It has changed our entire community."
— Bodie Brizendine, Head of School, Marin Academy
The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton,"the Duke of Wellington purportedly said. Of course, at the time, English school sports had no adult coaches. Students were deemed to be future leaders of the country, and, therefore, expected to organize and lead their teams. This was in sharp contrast with school sports in early America, whose design criteria seemed to be a matter of preparing students to be compliant factory workers.
Thus, a problem: How does an independent school with a goal of preparing students for leadership do so in a society in which adult coaches are more often than not lauded for trying to control every aspect of an athlete's performance — as long as they win?
From Positive Coaching Alliance's beginning more than eight years ago on Stanford University's campus, independent schools were among the first to seek us out as partners to address this challenge. The schools that have contacted us recognize the truth voiced by the late John Gardner, who founded Common Cause and was an inspiration and mentor to Founder Jim Thompson during our launch of Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA): "Outside the family, there isn't any other youth institution that equals sports as a setting in which to develop character. There just isn't."
His remark underpins the philosophy of PCA's movement to provide all youth athletes with a positive, character-building experience. We do this through the workshops we present to youth sports organizations of all stripes, including many independent schools. On the playing field, character education is not an abstract experience. Character is constantly tested in tangible ways. With the right guidance, the playing field — as well as courts, pitches, and pools — can provide youth with positive emotional engagement. PCA's goal is to ensure that the adults involved in sports are prepared to be character educators, to be able to take advantage of the endless procession of "teachable moments" that sports provides.
These teachable moments come, obviously, when athletes achieve or fall short of their athletic goals, and when coaches help them process the cause and effect of what they have just done. But teachable moments also come in the interludes — in practice, during team travel, while troubleshooting or even shooting the breeze — when coaches can teach athletes life lessons in persistence, teamwork, sacrifice, effort, discipline, leadership, and in overcoming adversity.
The many independent schools that partner with PCA find ways to integrate our ethos into their own. Their athletic programs come to complement, and even inform, the schools' efforts in character development, academics, and creation of an overall school culture.
Organic Integration
In the best cases, this integration of character lessons in sports occurs organically. For example, at the Urban School in San Francisco, students do not see their academic grades, instead receiving comments from their teachers and providing self-evaluation, says Brendan Blakely, athletic director. "In sports, we stress sportsmanship, work ethic, and responsibility to self and groups, including parents and teammates."Although Urban School's girls' basketball team has won its league championship four of the last five seasons, "We try not to talk all that much about winning," Blakely says. "When you have outcome-oriented goals, there are too many outside factors to consider. We talk about process a lot. That mimics our classroom."
Just over the Golden Gate Bridge at Marin Academy, "Athletic culture is school culture," says Joe Harvey, athletic director of a program that won one of PCA's National Youth Sports Awards in 2003. "You can't separate the two. Our athletic program is a mission-driven, co-curricular activity, a classroom whose doors open at 3 p.m. instead of 8 a.m."
Across the country, Washington, DC's Hyde Leadership Charter School, drawing from one of the nation's toughest neighborhoods, provides a co-curricular experience of athletics and academics. All students are required to compete in sports and receive grades of the same weight and value as all their academic grades, says Tal Bayer, athletic director. "We value excellence in sports, but we value attitude over aptitude. We reinforce our school's values through sports."
| Life Lessons from the Playing Field By Jim Thompson ⇒1The "Little Picture" of the immediate success or failure of our children's performance in youth sports obscures the vitally important "Big Picture" of the lessons they will learn from sports that will serve them throughout their lives. ⇒2Leadership is the release of energy, not telling people what to do. The best coaches get the most out of their players by getting them excited about how good they could be. ⇒3It's crucial to get the mental model right! The prevailing "win-at-all-cost" model needs to be banished in favor of the Double-Goal Coach who wants to win and use sports to teach life lessons. ⇒4Culture determines behavior. Although we like to see ourselves as independent actors, people are pack animals. We tend to conform to the expectations of the "teams" we want to be part of. It is essential to be explicit about norms for behavior in your sports program. ⇒5Fearing mistakes is worse than making them. It needs to be okay for kids to make mistakes in sports to unlock the potential for truly inspired performance. ⇒6People with full "Emotional Tanks" can surprise even themselves. So fill them! ⇒7Effort and enjoyment are entwined. There is no better place than sports to teach kids that hard work can be fun. ⇒8Is there trickle-up potential for youth sports? Can kids learn lessons in sports that will make them more ethical adults? Yes. ⇒9Kids love to talk about sports so much they'll even talk to their parents about it! ⇒10The game is short — enjoy the game. Your child's experience with sports will end abruptly, and, when it does, you will wish you had not been so obsessed with how well your child did. You'll wish you had fretted less and enjoyed it more. Jim Thompson is the founder and executive director of the Positive Coaching Alliance. He can be reached at [email protected]. This is excerpted from a talk he gave at Phillips Exeter Academy on October 26, 2006. |
"She always wanted to quit, but we stayed on her," Bayer says. "By the end of the season, she'd got her time down to 45 minutes. In her last race, she crossed the finish line beaming. The next year, we lost our coach and had no program, and she told me she was crushed, because cross-country had helped her realize she could do anything she wanted if she put her mind to it."
She had also taken that attitude to her academics, Bayer said. "She realized she'd been going through the motions, walking through her classes the way she'd walked on the cross-country course at first, but she became an outspoken leader: 'If I can do it, you can do it.'"
Up Interstate 95 in Wilmington, Delaware, Tower Hill School is another PCA partner practicing co-curricular athletics as defined by Athletic Director Jack Holloway. "'Extra-curricular' means school is over and now you're going to play. 'Co-curricular' means we're using athletics as a medium through which we continue to teach our students.
"I use the term 'educational athletics' for that medium that teaches lessons to kids that the classroom does not necessarily provide. You might be able to learn the value of teamwork in a lab setting, but it's easier to teach the value of teamwork through sports. You get immediate feedback to reinforce your lack of preparation, for example, or the value of hard work. When you get that publicly, maybe in the media, and on the scoreboard, it brings the lesson home quicker."
This statement from the school's trustees appears on brochures and parent letters: "The Tower Hill Board of Trustees believes that athletic competition is an integral part of the educational and developmental process of our students and that many important lessons are taught through athletic experience. Therefore, athletics are a fundamental part of the total curriculum at Tower Hill, fulfilling our motto of 'Multa Bene Facta,' many things done well. The objectives of coaches and teachers are identical: to help young people reach their fullest potential intellectually, emotionally, and physically. Accordingly, sportsmanship — the demonstration of appropriate conduct, honest rivalry, and graceful acceptance of the outcome — is as important as the full development of athletic skills. Critical to these teachings is the expectation that our community as well as our athletes will demonstrate respect for everyone involved in athletic competition."
Whether or not a school explicitly identifies its athletic program as co-curricular, it can incorporate the school's overall values and practices. For example, Lake Forest Academy, outside Chicago, strives to create global citizens and, therefore, sends its sports teams on culture-laden trips. Just as the school's academic program sends students to Kenya and the hurricane-stricken Gulf Coast, the boys' basketball team played in New York City and visited Harlem's Apollo Theater, the soccer team is planning a trip to China, and the hockey team is considering a visit to Russia, says Kevin Versen, athletic director.
Challenges Facing Schools
Co-curricular or otherwise, establishing and maintaining an athletic program that reflects and reinforces your school's mission and culture is not easy. Among the hurdles is the win-at-all-cost mentality that pervades our society, as well as general resistance to change, a shortage of coaches able and willing to meet school standards, and the difficulty of achieving consensus and buy-in to the desired culture."Independent schools too often can hide behind their mission statements and are unable to see the imperfections in their communities and unwilling to bring in outside help," says Joe Cheeseman, athletic director at The Town School in San Francisco. "Many independent schools are run like businesses, where there are two ways to measure success: which schools the kids move on to and how schools do athletically in terms of publicity, because the more successful, the easier it is to enroll kids and raise funds. The challenge is how to balance doing what's best for the kids with the needs of the school."
Most of the independent schools with which PCA partners deny feeling financial pressure for scoreboard wins. (Granted, the sample may be skewed since schools partner with PCA because they agree with us that using sports to teach life lessons is paramount to an educational athletic program.) Still, the cultural pressure to win at all cost is omnipresent and inescapable.
But that pressure is not invincible.
How Schools Overcome Challenges
The most important, frequently-mentioned ingredient for successful integration of an independent school's athletic program into the school's overall culture is buy-in at the top. "I'm fortunate," says Bill McDonald, athletic director at Houston's Strake Jesuit College Prep, "that our administration understands what a benefit the athletic portion of the day is to the student… that education doesn't end when the last classroom bell rings."But there are other elements that matter a great deal. Here are a few to consider:
Hire the right coaches. With independent schools often reliant on off-campus or part-time coaches, it is particularly important to assess their fit with school culture as part of the hiring process. For example, the Urban School's Blakely insists candidates examine the school's website to understand "what we do educationally and decide whether they can coach in keeping with our mission," he says.
The ultimate question is: "What kind of a people-person are they? I can provide resources to help them coach their sports better, but it's hard teaching an adult how to talk to young people."
Even with the best hires, Blakely engages in an ongoing process of educating coaches on Urban's overall culture and tries to ensure that each student's advisor is in contact with the student's coaches.
Use sports as a cultural unifier. "Our school is increasingly diverse ethnically and socioeconomically," says Cheeseman of The Town School. "Sports help bring our communities together."
Indeed, the heightened passion of a sporting event, which makes sports such fertile ground for life lessons to begin with, also helps disparate groups within a school let their hair down in ways they might not at a more decorous event, such as a fund-raiser — and doing so helps connect these groups in ways that benefit everyone.
Combine the drive to win with the drive to excel. "That PCA's Double-Goal Coach? model can contribute to excellence is an important piece for us," says Marin Academy's Harvey. "This stuff is not anti-competitive. It's making our teams stronger."
Still, the school's athletics program stresses the same philosophy — "excellence in process is key, and results will come" — that students experience in the classroom, Harvey says. "Athletics is the place where every 'test' is visible. This informs our conversations about classroom work. The teaching profession increasingly borrows from the language of coaching."
Form — and heed — constituent committees. When Lake Forest Academy students showed some rowdiness in the stands, the school's Student Athletics Council addressed the whole student body about how to be positive supporters. In fact, Lake Forest Academy's "athlete-first" philosophy stems from the advice of the school's Faculty Athletics Council, Versen says.
Institute rituals. Hyde uses peer-conducted EEMO meetings (an acronym for the descending levels of achievement one can attain: Excellence, Effort, Motions, Off-track) to assess athletes' progress, Bayer says. "On team camping trips, players fill out index cards describing whatever may be holding them back, and then we do a ceremonial tossing of the cards into a fire."
Start with character. Hyde emphasizes character and curiosity in all facets of the student experience, Bayer says. Therefore, "if we instill the character the way we should, students will have the curiosity and the hunger for knowledge in classrooms and on the athletic fields. If we teach them to do their personal best in everything, then it doesn't matter whether it's athletic or academic excellence they're pursuing."
The Benefits of High Standards
When Jeaney Garcia left full-time employment at PCA in 2006 (though she still leads workshops for us) to become athletic director at Los Angeles' Brentwood School, she made implementation of PCA programs at Brentwood a pre-condition to accepting the job.Now, she reports, "In our monthly captain's council meetings, we talk about how PCA workshops are affecting (students) in other aspects of their lives. They feel they are held to higher standards, so they can't even think about cheating or plagiarizing."
Brentwood has instituted an intra-school academic team championship, awarding a pizza party to the athletic team with the best GPA. And the school has achieved buy-in at another important level.
"The faculty feels as if we're working in concert. They know I'm not myopic about athletics. For example, we reduce warm-up times, so even though our teams get dismissed from class early, we've been able to keep them in class on game days 50 percent longer than before, and the teachers appreciate that.
"By changing the culture through PCA, everyone has felt a real difference. I've had two minor issues I've had to deal with, where last year the headmaster had 40 to 50 meetings with parents about playing time, reprimands, and inappropriate behavior; banned five parents from attending games; and our teams had 10 ejections or red cards.
"This year, one of our basketball coaches got a technical foul, and there was another incident. One of our soccer opponents was using profanity and calling our players a racial name and spitting in their faces. One of our players did stand his ground, but he would not fight. He told me if he had not gone through the PCA workshops and discussed them with his coaches, there would have been a bench-clearing brawl. We would have been on the cover of the Los Angeles Times."