Reforming School Sports
In my senior year of high school, I was slated to be a starting pitcher on the baseball team, and the “sixth man” on the basketball team that went on to win the state championship. But the world got in the way. It was 1970. That world was still roiling from the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s. I was 16 years old and seeking my identity; I let my hair grow beyond the required crew cuts that the coaches demanded.
My teammates warned me that I wouldn’t be allowed on the teams. They said, “You shouldn’t have to cut your hair, but you should cut your hair.” I chose to keep my hair. And my teammates were right: the coaches barred me from the teams, saying that somehow I hadn’t made the cut. The fact that I was a team oriented player did not sway their decisions. I was a threat to the culture.
Implicitly, the message was that there would be no hippies on the school’s sports teams. Student athletes were to resemble military recruits. The coaches were like the captains of ships on the high seas centuries ago: they did what they wanted to do, and the students were theirs to control, to praise, and to humiliate, if they deemed that necessary.
After getting over the pain of being barred, I joked that everyone without a crew-cut should be barred from the school. How could they let me in the physics lab if they couldn’t let me in the gym? Or conversely, if the let me in the physics lab, why couldn’t they let me in the gym? Could the math department join with the athletic department and bar me from class because of my hair?
That was more than fifty years ago. Since then, the educational world has been pushed to confront issues of diversity and equity, to understand that social-emotional skills improve learning, to provide teacher training in trauma-informed pedagogy, to appreciate that supporting student resiliency includes student voice, and to see that restorative discipline is a better alternative than shaming and punishing our children when they struggle to do the right thing. It’s been a steady evolution based on research and practice based on how young people learn and grow.
But athletic teams most often remain in a silo, without a curriculum that absolutely attaches to the educational mission of the schools—as if the teams aren’t really part of the school’s greater mission. Teams may be coached by members of the community who are not teachers. Coaches do not have to turn in lesson plans that build character. The dominant model of evaluating sports teams remains their wins and losses—because we as a society haven’t demanded that school sports be held accountable to a greater vision of child development.
We may attribute many developmental goals to our school athletic teams: self-discipline; accepting feedback; working with others; personal goal setting—but where is the curriculum, support, and accountability that would drive those goals, on every team? As my colleague Mitch Lyons says, “If we say that students should learn sportsmanship on teams, how can we do that without making social-emotional skill building a required part of the coach’s curriculum?”
So I was thrilled when Mitch sent me a curriculum for athletic departments that aligns with the character development we seek for our children, especially for our teenagers, who are in that cauldron of developing an adult identity. The title of the curriculum is “Remodeling Sports to Transform Lives.” I urge you to take a minute and skim through the table of contents—it is clear and positive. Mitch and his co-authors are distributing it for free—and it can be found here:
The thread running through my career, captured in book titles (Hanging In; Teaching the Whole Teen; Improve Every Lesson Plan with SEL; Hacking School Discipline Together) has been to pull students on the margins back into the center of school life, and thereby expand the center. It’s time to demand and support the same with all school sports teams in all schools: pull their work from the margins of engagement with students fully into the center of all our work in schools.
