sports

Coach invites mentors to model, not talk

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Education consultant Darryl Williams is taking a different approach to coaching his daughter’s 5th-grade basketball team, and it’s working wonders to focus the girls in on the game.

The idea is simple.

Williams and other coaches invited girls from the varsity high school basketball team to come to practice, but it wasn’t for the typical role model pep talk or coaching pointers.

According to Teach Like a Champion:

No, Darryl skipped the things mentors usually get asked to do and asked the varsity girls instead to practice with his girls—to participate in the drills alongside the younger girls but to practice like they would in a varsity practice. To model what it meant to them to practice.

Williams explained that the experience instantly changed the perspective of the girls on his young and inexperienced team, which included many who had never previously played.

“You should have seen their faces when they understood that for varsity girls, the layup line is full-speed,” Williams said.

The coach said that giving his players an opportunity to experience how serious athletes approach the game opened their eyes in ways a talk about teamwork or hustle couldn’t do.

“They never had to say a word, those girls, but the learning was deep. Seeing the level of focus and concentration from the older girls was a revelation to the younger girls: How ready they were when an activity started. How locked-in mentally. How they listened and used feedback . . . These things were suddenly clear,” Teach Like a Champion reports.

“Darryl says it was an epiphany for his girls. All of a sudden they understood in a day-to-day sense what it meant to be a serious athlete. Nobody had to explain anything.”

Education researchers have studied how age segregation in schools can undermine the development of responsibility.

Murray Milner, scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, wrote in Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids that “A system of increasing privileges and responsibilities linked to the year in school can increase the sense of community and reduce competition.”

Williams’ approach of letting local high school girls model how serious athletes put their full effort into practice undoubtedly improved his 5th-grade team both on and off the field.

A growing movement of coaches at the Positive Coaching Alliance are working with professional athletes to help locals create “Better Athletes, Better People” through a variety of resources, from workshops, to online courses, to certifications.

“The Positive Coach uses the power of positive reinforcement to pursue winning and the more important goals of teaching life lessons through sports,” according to the group’s website.

Small towns struggle to keep football alive

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The football team at North Dickinson County School in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is going through changes, adapting to a new version of the game to preserve a community tradition that dates back decades.

The North Dickinson Nordics have dominated their conference, making it to the state playoffs for 23 years in a row from 1991 to 2013, but declining participation in the aging former lumber town forced school officials to make a decision: end its decades-old football program entirely or move to a smaller eight-player league.

North Dickenson officials resisted the move as long as possible, but ultimately opted to make the downgrade.

“Your football team is really on life support when you’re on eight-man, because there’s no place to go after eight-man,” North Dickinson Athletic Director Michael Roell told The Washington Post. “We’re hoping we can still have a football team for school pride, for homecoming, for all the things that should stay in high school.”

It’s a situation facing many schools in Michigan and beyond.

According to the Post:

As the game of football faces challenges nationally—head injury concerns, rising costs, sport specialization—the effects are being felt first and most acutely in small towns such as this outpost in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. 

Michigan has lost 57 11-man high school football teams in the past five years, but most, state officials say, moved to the eight-player ranks. The state has poured resources into creating separate junior varsity leagues, varsity conferences and playoffs for eight-player teams.

Eight-player leagues are growing in other states, as well. The National Federation of State High School Associations reports enrollment for eight-player teams is up 12 percent since 2009, data collected before Washington, Wisconsin, and Hawaii added leagues.

At many schools like North Dickinson, the choice boils down to eight-man football, or no football at all.

Senior tight end Jared Miller said that after the departure of last year’s talented senior class, there weren’t even enough players to fill out an 11-man team.

“Nobody wanted to go, but nobody said anything bad about it,” Miller said. “It was this or nothing. We only would have had eight players on varsity.”

And while many folks at the school and other small towns across the country mourn the loss of football as they know it, eight-player leagues are providing a way to carry on a tradition that plays a critical role in the moral culture of their communities.

University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter, author of The Tragedy of Moral Education in America, writes that “moral education can work where the community, and schools and other institutions within it [like athletics], share a moral culture that is integrated and mutually reinforcing.”

Maintaining high school athletic opportunities, even on a smaller scale, is important because “the difference a coach can make in a youth’s life is enormous,” according to Los Angeles Clippers coach Doc Rivers.

Rivers, who advises the Positive Coaching Alliance, contends that positive influence begins with “showing high school and youth coaches how to teach life lessons while preparing them to win on the scoreboard.”

The Positive Coaching Alliance provides a wide variety of resources for coaches to help students form good character through athletics, from training sessions to workshops to online courses and other tools.

When our heroes falter: lessons from 3 UCLA athletes

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The recent arrest of three University of California Los Angeles players in China for shoplifting, and their subsequent return to the United States, provides valuable lessons on character, humility, and taking responsibility as role models.

In October, President Trump intervened to facilitate the release of three UCLA freshman basketball players who were caught shoplifting at several stores during a trip to China for an exhibition game.

The players—LiAngelo Ball, Jalen Hill, and Cody Riley—were suspended indefinitely from the basketball team once they arrived home, and they held a press conference in mid-November to own up to their misdeeds, which could have resulted in up to 10 years in a Chinese jail, NPR reports.

Each player at the press conference admitted to stealing, apologized for their actions, and pleaded for forgiveness in what’s become an embarrassing international incident for the university and the United States.

“I take full responsibility for the mistake I have made, shoplifting,” Riley said. “I know that this goes beyond me letting my school down, but I let the entire country down.”

“I take full responsibility for my actions, and I’m sorry,” said Ball, younger brother of Los Angeles Laker Lonzo Ball.

Jalen Hill told reporters “what I did was stupid, there’s just no other way to put it.”

The students also recognized the impact of their actions on their family, friends, teammates, university, and the United States.

“I apologize to my teammates, my coaches, and my family because of how much negative attention that I put on them that they do not deserve,” Hill said.

All three students stressed that the stealing is not their origin or destiny, and vowed to learn from the experience so it doesn’t happen again.

“I’d also like everyone to know that this does not define who I am,” Ball said. “My family raised me better than that and I’m going to make myself a better person from here on out.”

While these young men are not necessarily role models for most children, as parents don’t want their kids to become shoplifters, they are role models for some, a fact that Riley addressed in a message to his younger brother at the press briefing.

“To my younger brother, Ben, this is not the example that I want to set for you,” he said. “But from here on out, I promise I will be the best role model I can be . . .  for you to look up to.”

Taking responsibility is tough, but the players’ comments show their willingness to own up to their action, to ask for forgiveness, and to enter the slow process of rebuilding trust. Children who watch their athletic heroes humble themselves learn this is the only way to grow. People who can publicly admit their failures, seek the forgiveness of those they’ve wronged, and actively seek to change are the only ones worthy of emulation.

In the book The Death of Character, University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter wrote that the most essential feature of character “is the inner capacity for restraint—an ability to inhibit oneself in one’s passions, desires, and habits within the boundaries of a moral order.”

In this case, the student athletes failed by shoplifting.

But Hunter notes that “character is, in explicit ways, the embodiment of the ideals of a moral order . . . ” and the contrition and apology offered by the students illustrate their submission to a moral order they’ve violated.

This is the world we live in: one with fallible heroes who grow only by humility and taking responsibility.

Coaches looking to build strong character in students can find resources in University of Virginia’s basketball program, which coach Tony Bennett built on Five Pillars: Humility, Passion, Unity, Servanthood, and Thankfulness.

©2017 Advanced Studies in Culture

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