What If?

What if a child just wanted to be a child and dream different things and be different things every day and be happy and free, feeling loved and safe? What if as adults, we took joy in the very simple things our children love and supported them instead of pushed them? What if letting a child live in the moment while dreaming about the future through free play,fun creativity, and imagination, set them to a path they could enjoy and embrace instead of worry about? It takes baby steps to fix the problem. We do not want to try and change the culture the same way it manifests itself. Its all about the journey. Sometimes you have to treat the symptom to relax the patient first, then treat the disease. Peace of mind is victory

GUEST BLOG LIFE ON THE PLAYGROUND

Life on the Playground

As a primary school teacher for the last 10 plus years, I have always loved taking my classes out onto the playground.  You get to know your students in a whole different way as you watch them "free play".  Children spend a large part of their days being told what and when they are going to do things and ways to think about things.  Teachers place them into homogeneous groups and heterogeneous groups to work on problems.  Many primary teachers also assign seats so students are told where to sit and whom to sit next to.  (There are many sound educational reasons that these decisions happen.)

Enter...the playground.  Recess, it's most kids favorite part of the school day.  I have students who cannot tell time, but they know when recess happens.  If we ever miss recess, half the class lets me know it. 

As we burst out of the school onto the playground, choices happen and groups form almost instantly.  You have the group who loves to swing on the swings and see whose feet can touch the sky first.  Then there is another group who imagines they are the "good" guys and the other group who are the "bad" guys (they have to take turns on this one), and they run full speed ahead trying to catch each other.  Then you have the group who are competing to see who can get across the overhead ladder the fastest.  And then the group who just likes to hang out under the slide chatting.

Leaders of those groups form and it is interesting to see how that leadership takes shape.   If leaders don't think about the group as a whole, they are quickly ignored, and possibly avoided, and the group quickly follows another who values the group's wishes.  All of these decisions happen without an adult orchestrating the process.  Students who might not get the opportunity to lead, because maybe physical prowess is not valued in the classroom, get the chance to shine.  Their self esteem soars!

 By Kathleen Stanley

Winning, Development, and Fun are not mutually exclusive

3 in 1

I recently interviewed a high school varsity coach who also coached an n “elite club” team. The sport does not matter for this discussion. Hopefully by now you know my mantra that if it is really true, than it applies to all sports, and life. I did not tape record this interview because quite frankly, I did not think it was going to be anything special. I was interested in getting some more background information on the “elite” club team mentality. Specifically, how it applied to the younger children.

The beginning of the interview went very well. The coach was quite open about what he thought an “elite” player was and how his club tried to get all the younger players pretty much equal time during the games and to stress fun.

 I explained to him that was very commendable because only 1% of the kids going to college play at the DI level and only half of them play for free. I also told him that human beings don’t physically develop until their early twenties so it was good to get kids as much playing time and fun as possible. We believe in inclusion not exclusion.

What he didn’t understand or see is that I was trying to plant an idea with him about how he could adapt this fun philosophy to his high school team.

I was struck by his belief in winning over development and that how he understood very few of them would ever get a D I scholarship, but it didn’t matter to him. He had to win to keep his job, he said. But the rub is, he had only won one sectional championship, and then his team was loaded. Why wasn’t he open to change?

 I went and watched his team practice and play in two different games. Stunned doesn’t even begin to reveal how different his approach was with his high school team versus the club team he coached, or the way he said he coached. He rarely substituted. Even far ahead or behind he did not use a lot of extra players unless it was a complete blowout. I went back to see him for another interview.

I started by asking him about his substitution policy as it pertained to his high school team. He said that the reason he rarely substituted was that his starting players needed to continue to play together so that they could form a more cohesive unit. When I explained to him that his starters rarely completed more than four passes in a row, he just shook his head and said the subs would complete even less passes. These players were all mostly “elite” club players and I wondered how they could be so weak in this department if they played on the same “elite” club team all year.

Again, I was stunned at the answer. He said that kids have to play on “elite” club teams if they want to get the exposure by major colleges to get a DI scholarship. When I asked how many kids he has sent to a DI college on a full athletic scholarship he could not answer. When I checked around, I found the answer to be ZERO.

I then asked him why his substitute players, (a term I dislike immensely) should practice hard for him if they knew they would not be afforded a chance to play in a game. He stated evenly that they were role players and knew their position on the team was to help the starters (I dislike that term also) get better and to push the starters in practice so that they could play better.

When I told him I went to two of his games and saw the disgruntled players sitting on the bench ignoring what was going on during the game he did not believe me. He said that the substitute players weren’t good enough to play very much and that they had not developed during the year to even suggest to him that they deserved playing time.

When I asked him maybe the reason they had not developed was because they felt helpless and knew no matter what they did they would not get to play. He got upset and asked me what the purpose of the interview really was? He suggested that I did not know enough about his team to question him about playing time. He had won a championship coaching in high school and played at a very high level and knew what he was doing.

Now I could have let it go right there but I figured since I had gone this far I might as well ask one more question. Did he think playing more players and creating inter team competition would help his team, keep his better players rested and fresh, and foster a greater team chemistry? Which, of course would lead to a higher level of play, and more victories, I believe. No he said. The weaker players would not get better and would just bring his good layers “down” when they were playing instead of the starters or with mixed in with them that would wreck any team chemistry. The he added the kicker. Besides, his players wanted him to play to win and they were content to sit on the bench.

If you think this is an isolated incident or interview, it is not. You want to know why? This is actually a combination of three different interviews I did with three different coaches in three different sports. I melded their answers into one.

You can follow VJ on Twitter @VJJStanley, face book frozenshorts, website frozenshorts.com, email vj@frozenshorts.com, and at his office 585-743-1020

No college with my sport

No college with my sport

For those of you following along with my program I first want to thank you for your support. Trying to change a culture is very difficult. Your support is truly appreciated.

There has been a new recent development in high school and club sports. Children are purposely choosing colleges to attend that do not have their sport.

That is right; a purposeful decision is being made to “Stop the Tsunami.” There can be no parental disappointment in the child if they are attending a college that does not have their “chosen” sport and they are not playing if the college offers the academics the child is interested in. They go to a college a good distance away so that the parents cant “pop in.”

I am talking about the 99% here, not the true DI athlete with multiple offers.

 Very few parents will push their children to pick a college that they don’t want to attend. When it does happen, we see the child go to that college for one year, still not play or play sparingly, and then transfer to a college that does not have their sport.

We have interviewed many of these parents and children and the disconnect between the child’s desires and the parents’ wishes offer a stark contrast. On one hand the child is so sick of having to play their sport year round that they see college as an opportunity to break the chain that binds them to their parents’ wishes. Some of the children say things to me like: “I don’t want to play anymore.”  “The college that I wanted didn’t have my sport.” “It wasn’t fun anymore.” And my favorite, “It never really was a priority of mine.”

Others went to a college that had their sport  and were so turned off at the prospect of doing this for another 4 years that they talked about the coach and the commitment being overwhelming and didn’t visit another college that had their sport.

On the other hand the majority of parents that I talked to were genuinely surprised by their children’s decision. Not that they were disappointed, they just didn’t see it coming. When I explained to them what their child was probably thinking, almost all of them, okay all of them said “now that you explain it to me, when we were visiting colleges our child was way more interested in the non athletic parts of the college.” Or something to that affect.

When I ran into the child or the parent a year later the stories were almost always the same. The child was relieved and the parent was now looking back with 20/20 vision and had the light go on!