PARENTS+COACHES: The Teamwork Need for Building Character

We all have heard that sports build “Character”. That is one of the basic arguments for including competitive athletics into the educational institutions at all levels. Many people, however, believe that sports reveal "character". I am among the those who prescribe to the second opinion.

This opinion was based on over 40 years of my experiences in working with youngsters of all ages in a variety of sports AND in my 15+ years as a classroom teacher.

Reflecting on these statements I have now come to believe there is credence to both. Character is developed “within” the home environment of children from the early stages of infancy. Thus, parents provide the building blocks of “character” upon which the child will rely on while navigating within the pre-school and elementary school environment.

What about those children who grew up in “single” parent families where the “parent” may have been a “grandmother” or other “relative”?

 How many of the pro athletes engaged in “domestic violence”, “drug or alcohol addiction”, “violent crime” or other unlawful behavior cite lack of a father, mother or “caring family” as an excuse for their transgressions?

Clearly, whatever type of family that exists for chilren these days has a profound impact on the type of “character” that enters into the athletic arena. Whether instilled with high quaility character traits through the home or “less than optimal” character attributes do to a “less than ideal” childhood environment, the developing athlete needs to be taught all the social skills associated with “good  or quality character” traits.

The important “learning” environment for teaching “high character” qualities through sport participation IS INTRUSTED to a coach. So, whether you believe it is sport or parent/family that builds “character”, it should be obvious that BOTH are needed. The teamwork between parent/parents and coach is important in both “reinforcing” and “instilling” the positive “values” that EVERY child needs to mature into a quality adult “good citizen” within society.

In my last post, I talked about the education needed to be a good, all-round coach in these times. Tactical and Technical Sport Skill knowledge is not enough. Physiological, Biomechanical and Sociological Skills need to be added to the tool chest in order to be a truly effective TEACHER of “people”. Remember, we are not so much coaching a sport as we are coaching “people”. This means the development of the whole person should be the main factor in determining “what”, “why” and “how” we coach.

Parents also need to evaluate their “role” in the athletic development of their children if, for no other reason, athletics will play a role in either “reinforcing” or “breaking down” the values parents are trying to instill in their children. It is no accident that the headlines today are full of “negative” behavior by collegiate and pro athletes.” Character” is not being taught…somewhere.

As great food for thought, READ THE ARTICLE BELOW and see if this is a High School Football team (or any sport ) you would want your children to experience. 

In an age of ever-increasing “crime” within Pro Sport (especially Football) we need more Role Models like  Antonio Pierce to be “highlighted” in the media.

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Giants’ Former Pro Bowler Leads a High School Powerhouse

By BILLY WITZSEPT. 26, 2014

LONG BEACH, Calif. — As Antonio Pierce, the football coach at Long Beach Polytechnic High, walked off the school’s lumpy grass practice field on a recent afternoon, a crisp, detail-oriented, two-and-a-half-hour practice behind him, he laughed at the question tossed his way.

Why was he here? It was a question for which Pierce has never really had a good answer, his life’s path rarely following any sort of grand design.

Pierce had no scholarship offers in high school and was not drafted out of college, but he became a Pro Bowl linebacker and a captain for the Giants, who themselves embodied the underdog ideal, when they won the Super Bowl in February 2008. He had no experience selling cars, but he is a partner in a handful of car dealerships in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, with more in the works. His training ground for becoming an ESPN analyst was an internship on the “Howard Stern Show.”

“Sometimes I sign up for things and I don’t know why,” Pierce said. “I didn’t really approach this in the sense that, man, I want to go out here and be a coach. It just kind of happened.”

Photo

 “Sometimes I sign up for things and I don’t know why,” said Pierce as he supervised wind sprints at Long Beach Polytechnic High on Monday. Credit Stuart Palley for The New York Times

Pierce, 35, who retired after sustaining a neck injury during a noncontact practice drill in 2010, was content to be a football dad watching his sons, including Deandre, now a junior defensive back at Poly. One day, the school’s athletic director, Rob Shock, casually asked Pierce if he would be interested in coaching. Sure, Pierce said, figuring that he could help out with the defensive line.

But a few months later, the longtime Poly coach, Raul Lara, resigned, and Shock encouraged Pierce to apply for the position. Of the 55 applicants and the eight who were interviewed, Pierce was the only one with a Super Bowl ring — and the only one without any coaching experience.

“Yeah, he doesn’t have any coaching experience, but he had a lot of knowledge, passion, energy, dedication and desire for the position,” Shock said. “He made it a point to us that he really wanted to take on this position. He still had that itch he wanted to scratch.”

If hiring Pierce was unconventional, it made sense for a school with such rich ties to the N.F.L. Poly has sent 55 players to the league, according to Pro-Football-Reference.com, far more than any other high school. Among its N.F.L. alumni are Gene Washington, Tony Hill, Mark Carrier, Willie McGinest and Carl Weathers, who earned more acclaim as an actor than he did as a linebacker for the Oakland Raiders. Marcedes Lewis and DeSean Jackson are among six former Poly players on current N.F.L. rosters.

Though the football tradition runs deep in the community, defining the school’s identity is not simple. Poly is something of a melting pot, with more than 5,000 students roughly split among whites, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians and Pacific Islanders. The school, located around the corner from the old V.I.P. Records — a landmark of West Coast rap — also draws students from the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods, some of whom attend its magnet programs.

Navigating these worlds is often a tricky dance, even for the school’s best football players. The Star-Ledger reported in February, days before the Philadelphia Eagles released Jackson, their former star receiver, that they were troubled by his affiliation with gang members he had known since childhood.

And while another alum, Tennessee Titans defensive tackle Jurrell Casey, received a four-year contract with $20.5 million guaranteed last month, his older brother Jurray, who had a scholarship to play at Oregon, is serving 50 years to life for murder.

Don Norford, who has been coaching football and track at Poly since 1976, said it was important for the football coaches to know not only what their players were good at — football — but also where they needed help, be it socially, academically or financially. Building those relationships can be challenging.

“With our kids, that respect is not going to come just because you’re a coach because they’ve had so many adults fail them,” said Norford, who has long run off-season workouts for college and N.F.L. players.

Pierce grew up close by, in Compton, at the height of gang troubles in the late ’80s and early ’90s. He said he related to his players’ circumstances. His father was living in Bermuda, and all he knew at that age was that he wanted to play football as long as he could. School was not important, and making good choices was more happenstance than habit.

“It was hard not to be influenced,” he said. “I know that. I have the same story.”

Though Poly has experienced plenty of football success, winning eight of the last 17 section championships — the large-school division in the greater Los Angeles area — Pierce wanted to create a greater sense of accountability, of standards that would translate off the field.

He raised the required minimum grade-point average for players to 2.5 from 2.0, which Pierce estimated had cost him seven players. He said the team’s G.P.A. had climbed to 2.97 by the end of the summer from 2.6 in February.

There is a mannequin in the meeting room dressed in the uniform the Jackrabbits will wear for their upcoming game, and Pierce expected his players to adhere to every detail. Adidas provided the black helmets and golden metallic face masks, which were designed by Snoop Dogg, a former Poly football player. There are no towels, no tape with handwritten messages. Pierce also expected his coaches to keep their shirts tucked in and their behavior buttoned down on the sideline. When a starting receiver mouthed off to a female trainer during the week, he found himself on the bench for a half.

Pierce, talking with his players Monday, had a Super Bowl ring but no coaching experience when he was hired by Poly from a field of 55 applicants. Among his changes, Pierce raised the players’ required G.P.A. to 2.5. Credit Stuart Palley for The New York Times

“Football is not a long-term goal,” Pierce said. “It’s a short-term job.”

Pierce does not set the clocks ahead by five minutes, as Tom Coughlin, his former coach with the Giants, does — “They’d be calling me down to the district office,” Pierce said — but he locks the gate to the field at 3:59 p.m., one minute before practice starts.

“If you do everything you’re supposed to do, it’s going to help you in other areas, not just football,” said Joseph Wicker, a defensive lineman who is being recruited by Washington, Oklahoma, Miami, Texas Tech and Arizona State. “But he just tells you once; he approaches us like grown men.”

For years, the meeting room where the team watched film had been a windowless, dingy cave that carried the scent of sweaty young men. Now, most of the light bulbs work on the high ceiling, the wooden floors have been polished, the walls have been painted, and at the end of each day, the new chairs are placed upside down on the new tables.

“How can you have the morale of a championship program and yet you’re in a dungeon?” Pierce said as he sat in the room. “To me, it’s all about perception. What do these kids see every day? If there’s chairs on the floor and trash on the floor, what are they going to do? I told them this is our house for four to five months out of the year; we’ve got to keep it clean. When they go in the locker room, it’s the same thing. Otherwise, we’ll have those Long Beach roaches running around in here.”

Pierce said the recent domestic violence and child abuse cases roiling the N.F.L. had made for instructive talking points with his team. He has mentioned his own brush with trouble — accompanying his teammate Plaxico Burress to a club on the night in November 2008 when Burress accidentally shot himself in the leg. Pierce, who took Burress to a nearby hospital, was questioned by a grand jury for returning Burress’s gun to his home in New Jersey, but was not indicted.

“It starts here,” Pierce said. “Don’t disrespect women. Don’t disrespect teammates. Look at Ray Rice. Look at Adrian Peterson. I was in that situation with Plaxico. Don’t make perception turn into reality. Don’t make people see a certain image turn into reality for you. We talk about it on a daily basis.”

On the practice field, which is ringed by a track and lined by towering palm trees, the players separated into position groups. Pierce, wearing a green, long-sleeve Poly T-shirt, white Derrick Rose basketball shorts and a visor on his shaved head, did not look far removed from playing shape as he worked with the defensive front seven, rehearsing which gaps in the line they were supposed to fill. Upside-down trash cans served as offensive linemen.

Nearby, T. J. Houshmandzadeh, a former N.F.L. receiver, worked with the receivers on their footwork getting off the line.

Pierce and Houshmandzadeh are recognizable faces, but the other eight to 10 coaches are familiar presences. Many grew up in the neighborhood, played for Poly and work jobs — security guards, personal trainers, bus drivers — that allow them to be at practice most afternoons. The only one who works on campus is A. J. Luke, the assistant head coach. He runs practice on Wednesday, when Pierce flies back to Bristol, Conn., to do his N.F.L. analyst work for ESPN.

Though Norford did not want to be disrespectful toward Lara, the previous coach, he said the hiring of Pierce “has given us life. We’ve got our soul back.”

The practices are organized, crisp and heavy on fundamentals, and the schemes are simple, players and assistants said. The Jackrabbits are 3-1 after a rigorous nonleague schedule and expect to cruise to a league title they have failed to capture only once since 1985. The playoffs, the season that matters most here, will begin in early November.

Pierce, who is paid a $6,000 stipend — the maximum allowed by the district for coaches — was uncertain how long he would coach. He has goals he wants to achieve, the most ambitious of which is a state championship. It could be one season or it could be five. He was no more certain about how long he would last at ESPN. Or selling cars.

And besides, why did he need to have a plan?

As he walked off the field after practice, it was without any sense of drudgery. The smell of the grass, the sound of shoulder pads and helmets colliding were not just familiar, they were invigorating.

“I love being out here,” Pierce said. “It keeps me young and fresh. It gets me excited. For three or four hours, it gives me peace of mind.”_________________

PLEASE SEE IF THE FOLLOWING PSYCHOLOGICAL SKILL PRACTICE IN THE STUDY BELOW MAY BE SOMETHING THAT ALL COACHES NEED TO BE EDUCATED IN…….

Helping youth sport coaches integrate psychological skills in their coaching practice

Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health

Volume 6, Issue 4, 2014

Martin Camiré^a* & Pierre Trudel^a

Abstract

Researchers have demonstrated the benefits of psychological skills training for athletes, but few studies have examined how coaches integrate such skills in their coaching practice. Empirical evidence indicates that the coaches have a preference to learn psychological skills in a user-friendly manner with consultant support. The purpose of the current study is to help youth sport coaches integrate psychological skills (leadership, goal-setting, self-awareness, visualisation) in their coaching practice

Findings indicated that the researcher was able to put in place an initiative that helped the coaches integrate psychological skills in their coaching practice.

In recent years, a growing number of empirical studies have demonstrated how psychological skills training (PST) effectively enhances athlete performance and that athletes enjoy using psychological skills.

Examples of psychological skills include leadership, goal-setting, self-awareness and visualisation, which can be employed to increase performance, encourage a positive approach to competition and achieve personal well-being.

PST programmes for young athletes can be effective because they can facilitate athletes’ personal growth and provide them with the mental toughness needed to thrive in and out of sport (Gucciardi et al. 2009b). In the last decade, several researchers have developed programmes designed to provide PST to young athletes

Quantitative results demonstrated that participants involved in the PST programmes reported more positive changes for mental toughness, resilience and flow than control group participants. Qualitative findings indicated that participants enjoyed the PST programmes because they helped them improve their preparation, increase their work ethic and enhance their mental toughness. 

Collectively, these studies form a growing body of evidence indicating that PST can facilitate sport performance and personal development.