Project Coach and Youth Development

From the Director's Desk - 1/31/12

2012-01-31T13:02:00.000-08:00

As we prepare to embark upon another season at Project Coach (this spring will mark our 16th sports season since we began back in 2004), I’d like to reflect upon some of the key issues that will drive our organization forward through this year, and beyond, as we strive to continue our growth as a cutting-edge youth development organization. Our achievements on the field, in the classroom, and in the community have been - and will continue to be - superbly documented by our outstanding cohort of graduate fellows who do a remarkable job serving as mentors to youth in the program. Indeed, one of our latest additions will see our coaches recording their own achievements through online blogs and reflections, as we seek out new avenues to empower their roles in Project Coach. Rather than duplicate such accounts, my entries will seek to cover issues at a more macro-level, and detail the impact that current trends in after-school programming are having on our organization, as well as how we are expanding and adapting the services that we offer youth in the program.

On the eve of our latest iteration of PC, there can be no more topical jumping-off point than sharing the current trends and “hot button” issues that are currently dominating the agendas of the program directors, and are central to our thoughts in the new year. Indeed, the process of confining the discussion to a short-list of three areas is probably worthy of a blog post itself. Nevertheless, when we think of “what keeps us awake at night”, as one of my co-directors accurately describes it, the following topics certainly merit making the final cut.

1. Sustainability

As our organization has grown, the question of sustainability - both financially and logistically - has become central to our thoughts. From the not-so-distant days of running a twice-weekly pilot program for a handful of youth from Holyoke - when our only expenses were the relatively insignificant stipends paid to teens and one supervisor - we have evolved into a multi-faceted organization that has several programming streams, and with it a multitude of ongoing costs to manage. More coaches (30+) working alongside a team of licensed educators, and a full-time Academic Director, all contributing more hours of service to the program than ever before has allowed us to offer an array of activities...all at a significantly increased cost.

We have been extremely fortunate to find in the North End Campus Coalition a primary funder and supporter that recognizes the need for full-service community schools, and has identified Project Coach as a key contributor in helping to achieve the lofty goals of a true wrap-around service model. Similarly, many foundations and private and public entities have generously awarded PC funding through various grant programs. Nevertheless, securing financial sustainability on a multi-year basis remains pivotal to the long-term success of our organization, and can often be a difficult task to focus squarely on, particularly given the tendency to become so invested in the day-to-day operations of programming.

I was particularly intrigued to hear about such issues during a recent webinar hosted by Guidestar (a leading information source on non-profits), and facilitated by John Thomas, the Managing Director of Orr Associates (a consultancy firm specializing in providing advice to non-profits seeking philanthropic support). Addressing the “new normal” that has been established in fund-raising endeavors since the financial collapse of 2008, the webinar stressed the importance of prioritizing large gifts - rather than seeking multiple smaller awards - regardless of whether working with individuals or corporate donors. Surprisingly, the presenters were cautious of the benefits of utilizing new social media forums to garner support, suggesting that the trends of philanthropic giving had yet to fully catch up with the latest technological advancements. Perhaps more predictably, yet certainly pertinent in Project Coach’s case, the discussion vindicated the approach of targeting specific projects that are central to the goals of the organization for funding consideration, rather than trying to bend the needs of the program to the focal areas of a particular funder. All food for thought as we begin to look beyond 2012 and the kind of sustainability that will be necessary to maintain and expand PC programming.

2. Risk Management

An unavoidable issue within non-profit organizations in the 21st century is - without doubt - risk management, and all that it entails. As program-focused directors, it can often present itself as an additional drain on time and resources, and yet we recognize that it rightly sits atop the list as one of the most important aspects of our work. Across the breadth of our programming, risk management issues confront us at every turn: thousands of miles racked up each year to and from sites; a staff of 50 teachers, college students, faculty, and high school students working with hundreds of young children; high action sports in several settings; the organized chaos of pick-up at the end of each day.

When confronting this issue, PC’s approach remains vigilantly constant; create safe spaces at all times and think about each and every decision that is made. Regardless, we also recognize that - inevitably - accidents occur, and despite our best efforts, some things are simply beyond our control. Making sure that each incident concerning an elementary-school student is documented and followed up with is critical, as is ensuring that we have documented parental support for each of our youth coaches. Completing state-mandated CORI checks for all non-school personnel involved in the program is a standard process for all students being oriented to the PC, as are driving credential reviews. Perhaps an even more critical method to effectively managing risk resides in the deployment of the PC coach training curriculum, and its focus on creating a safe environment for participants. By making sound decisions about behavioral management and appropriate activities, youth coaches can help to dictate the tone of each session, and set a precedent for an atmosphere that encourages fun and adventure, while at the same time being mindful of the well-being of each child.

This directive issued by the 4-H organization has helped to frame some of the critical risk management areas that all youth-based non-profits face, and overviews many best-practice policies that PC has adopted.

3. Curriculum Design

A strength at Project Coach has always been - and continues to be - the devotion to creating a rich and diverse curriculum that engages youth coaches in developing ‘supercognitive’ attributes (such as building effective communication skills, navigating conflict resolution, and mastering attentional control). These skills are then deployed across the various arms of PC programming, and in the wider contexts of the lives of teens, and in particular the domain of school.

Traditionally, the PC team has used its experience in both education and sports science to mesh an integrated curriculum using research from a wide array of sources, crafting unique lessons during combined planning sessions. This process has served the program well, and has allowed the directors to control to direction of the program, and devise units with a certain degree of adaptability and “free reign”. In recent months, discussions have centered around the merits and deficiencies of “tying in” the PC curriculum to a more rooted and established model. Though individual units and lessons would still be created using the same initiative as in past years, a consensus has emerged that being linked to a more systematic blueprint would be beneficial not only for providing added direction, but also for incentivizing potential funders through a tangible connection to a tried-and-tested framework.

One such framework that has long been admired and continues to play a pivotal role in the coaching world is the Pyramid of Success made famous by legendary coach John Wooden. The vision of building skills in a progressive way to ultimately achieve ‘competitive greatness’ fits the PC notion of acquiring a cadre of skills that all effective coaches and teachers need to be successful. More importantly, the framework allows PC to continue to develop unique lessons that provide experiential activities for coaches to learn and refine these skills, while keeping the ‘bigger picture’ in sharp focus.

Though still a part of an ongoing discussion, the Pyramid of Success may well become an established component of PC programming as we move forward.

Feedback, suggestions, and comments from those that know our work and share our passion for youth development are critical to our continued success and improvement; we hope to get your input!

Andy

And What A Grand Finale It Was-- PC Fall 2011!

2011-12-20T15:51:00.000-08:00

Appreciation, recognition, reflection, and even a little healthy competition – these are just a few words that describe the season’s ending events. We had the opportunity to commemorate the end of a truly remarkable season on two separate celebrations. We kicked off the final week of Project Coach by bringing the blueshirts to Smith College for an evening of games and pizza. The highlight of the night was the long-awaited redshirt vs. blueshirt basketball game! Who doesn’t like a little friendly competition? The energy was through the roof (so were some of the egos!). An hour and a half in, and no one wanted to stop! One thing is for certain-- we work with a highly energetic group of young people, who not only know how to play ball, but how to have fun!

The capstone of the season was our celebratory banquet followed by an outing to the Springfield Armor’s basketball game. Blueshirts, redshirts, teachers, and family members gathered at the Brightwood Health Clinic to begin our final gathering of the fall season. The purpose of the banquet was to recognize the accomplishments of our amazing group of blueshirts and the program as a whole. The redshirts took turns recognizing each of their blueshirts by making thoughtful remarks about contributions to Project Coach. Then the redshirts took the crowd by surprise with a song dedicated to the group of blueshirts. By the end of the event, it was clear that everyone felt we had become a family with members that truly care for each other’s wellbeing.

After the banquet, we left for the Springfield Armor’s game. There wasn’t a person in the arena that could have missed the presence of the Project Coach crew. Our blueshirts were yelling and cheering, showing off their well-developed coaching voices. There were many memorable moments; here is a couple worth mentioning:

Joe, one of our blueshirts, was invited on the court for a shooting competition. As he was waiting on the side of the court, his fellow coaches with loud chanting of his name, “Joe, Joe, Joe”, encouraged Joe!

Colten, another blueshirt, was a dancing machine. He was dancing so wildly that he won the dancing competition at halftime. As a result, everyone in our group got a Dunkin Donuts gift card. To say the least, Colten was very proud of himself.

At the end of the game, we were given the opportunity to meet the coach of the Springfield Armor’s team. Our blueshirts asked thoughtful questions that showed they honestly care about being the best coaches they can be. It was really powerful ending the season with advice and inspirational words from a professional coach.

We are all very excited to continue growing as a group next season!

Building Community in the North End

2011-12-05T07:22:00.000-08:00

A week before Thanksgiving, Project Coach hosted a pizza party. Teen coaches, parents, teachers from Gerena elementary school, and representatives from community non-profits gathered on a Friday evening to enjoy dinner and to discuss important issues in the Springfield schools.

We talked about how to help children do better in the North End schools. Colton Stovall, a freshman at Commerce High School, explained his point of view that teachers, parents, and the students themselves have to work together so that the student can do well in school. “If one person doesn’t do his part, it just doesn’t happen.” A father of a fourth grader from Gerena elementary school explained his own educational philosophy where teachers and parents should share ideas to provide the best education for children. Bryant Whitsett, a junior at Putnam High School, emphasized that his best teacher were the ones who communicated with his parents. Some even came to his home, or made regular phone calls to establish a strong connection.

The community pizza party provided a forum to make these connections. Teachers talked to their students’ parents in an informal setting. Parents met and spent some time with the teenagers who their children look up to as their coaches. Teachers, parents, and coaches gained a fuller understand of Project Coach by getting to know each other as the people who can contribute to make the program even better.

-Written by Katie Joyce, Redshirt Graduate Fellow

Young Adult Author Kevin Markey Visits Gerena Elementary School

2011-11-29T07:17:00.000-08:00

On Friday, November 18th, Gerena Elementary School welcomed young adult author, Kevin Markey, with open arms and eager smiles. Born and raised in Springfield, Kevin writes early chapter books about baseball and is a lifelong Red Sox fan. He challenged the students with riddles and let them in on his "3 secrets of writing." Many of the kids were able to get their own copy of Markey's book signed and got to talk to him about their own writing in school. See the video to experience a bit of this fun-filled afternoon!

The Impact of Project Coach in Shaping Student and Coach Identity

2011-11-22T07:54:00.000-08:00

Yesterday marked the final day of tutoring before Thanksgiving break. Huddled around a square table in the Chesnut Middle School library, Taylor and I assisted coaches Jon and Loeb put the final touches on their creative English assignments. Their project entailed transforming a simple manila folder into a suitcase that told a story of their individual lives. On the outside, they listed what they considered to be the four most crucial aspects of their identity. Both Coach Jon and Coach Loeb, after the categories of "Student" and "Son" proudly preserved an area on the folder that read, in big black letters, "COACH."

In talking with Jon about why he'd chosen "COACH" as one of the defining characteristics in his life, I began to feel just how profoundly the experience of Project Coach has impacted his sense of self. Next to a skillfully sketched drawing of a coach mentoring a young player, Jon's words spoke for themselves: "Through being a coach, I've learned to be responsible, organized, and mature." It was evident from Jon's carefully articulated thoughts how much being a mentor to young athletes in his community has not only shaped his identity but his intrinsic sense of self-worth and value. "Yeah, I'm a coach-- they look up to me. That's it!" he joked playfully. "When you've got other people looking up to you, that changes everything." Listening to Jon's reflection on his own role in Project Coach has given me pause to take a step back and reconsider my role as a redshirt in the lives of the coaches and players I interact with everyday. It sparked a sharp sense of solidarity between the blueshirts and myself, and the other redshirts in the program-- day in and day out, we all wear "many hats"-- student; coach; son/daughter; sister/brother; friend; teammate; teacher-- we are never just one thing. Hearing Jon so affectionately describe the way being a coach has impacted his sense of self sparked a new awareness in my own role as a mentor figure in the lives of my blueshirts, friends and family. I guess we're always learning something new about ourselves through sharing perspectives with those around us!

PC Youth Respond to Roberto Clemente Story

2011-11-14T20:44:00.000-08:00

Project Coach high school coaches recently led a sports literacy lesson with their elementary players on the legendary Puerto Rican baseball star, Roberto Clemente.

After reading Jonah Winter's book, each class participated in a contest to create a commemorative placard to place outside of Roberto Clemente field, where PC participants gather two days a week to play soccer outside of Chesnut Middle School. See the video below to learn more about the winners!

Project Coach @ Western New England University

2011-11-10T13:12:00.001-08:00

At its November 10, 2011, meeting, the Sport Management Association invited Project Coach (PC) Director Andy Wood and Assistant Director Greg Rosnick to campus to give a presentation on PC's work with Springfield Public School students in the North End, in a program that utilizes urban high school students as mentors to inner-city youth. Wood and Rosnick talked to SMA members about the impact of this unique program that leverages sport to promote healthy lifestyles and teach life skills, on both the youth participants and the high school "coaches," 100% of whom have graduated from high school since the program's inception in 2005. This is a remarkable statistic in a school system where barely half of high school students make it through to graduation.

by Professor Curt Hamakawa, Director of Center for International Sport Business, Western New England Univ.

Beyond the classroom, off the field, and over the hurdle

2011-11-04T06:09:00.000-07:00

“Believe me, the reward is not so great without the struggle”

As Project Coach continues to move forward with our new literacy program, the 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders at Lincoln, Brightwood and Gerena elementary schools in Springfield were introduced to one Wilma Rudolph – an African American track star in the 1960’s who overcame debilitating polio on her way to a career marked by numerous accolades.

On September 7th, 1960, in Rome, Wilma became the first American woman to win 3 gold medals in the Olympics. She won the 100-meter dash, the 200-meter dash, and ran the anchor on the 400-meter relay team. Beyond this, she won numerous awards and other accolades – far too many to mention here.

“I believe in me more than anything in this world”

What does all this mean for Project Coach? For starters, it means that we are exposing inspiring life-stories of minority role models to students, many of whom do not know the likes of Wilma Rudolph, Tiki Barber, or the famed Roberto Clemente – a person with whom the kids share a connection, as the soccer field outside of Chesnut Middle School is named Roberto Clemente Field. More importantly, it showcases to the Blueshirt coaches and elementary players alike that overcoming adversity, disability, circumstance is anything but impossible. Success through hard work and perseverance (a focus word a few weeks back) is always, always obtainable.

Wilma Rudolph's story sparked a lively discussion in the minds of my 3rd graders. They were curious about what polio was (one of them claimed to have it!), what “disability” meant, and why it was necessary to overcome in order to achieve what Wilma Rudolph was able to achieve. I offered a personal anecdote about my own struggles with speech and stuttering, and saw players begin to make the connection between achievement and perseverance –much akin to a light bulb being turned on for the first time. All around it was a magnificent week, and the opportunities to motivate and encourage seem endless.

“It doesn't matter what you're trying to accomplish. It's all a matter of discipline. I was determined to discover what life held for me beyond the inner-city streets.”

Written by Elyse Quadrozzi, Redshirt Graduate Fellow

New Literacy Initiative Launched With Great Success!

2011-10-27T15:57:00.000-07:00

Dear Project Coach Friends and Supporters -- please see below for a quick recap of our newest literacy initiative, by Academic Director Greg Rosnick!!

Jackie Robinson, Wilma Rudolph and Mia Hamm- these legendary sports names are just some of the sports stories that third, fourth, and fifth graders are reading about this season in Project Coach during our new sports-based children’s book initiative.

Last week’s reading program continued to introduce the children to strong sports characters, as they read about the legendary Pittsburgh Pirate, Roberto Clemente. Clemente was a proud Hispanic man with undeniable talent. But as the children at Project Coach found out, he was more noteworthy because of his undying charity to his fellow man.

After reading the book “Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates” by Jonah Winter and completing activities concerning Roberto’s story, all nine Project Coach classes took part in a friendly competition. Each class came up with a placard inscription that could be placed beneath the sign of Roberto Clemente Park, which just so happens is the very field on which Project Coach Soccer practices and games are played.

The following placard is the winning entry, submitted by Gerena 5^th Graders Axsel and KC. Congratulations guys!

“Roberto Clemente was a great baseball player and man. He was a proud Puerto Rican who stood up for himself and inspired people. He helped people with his charity. Sadly, he died on December 31^st, 1972, flying to help earthquake victims. We will always remember him as a great baseball player and a great man!”

Using Video to Teach in Project Coach-- A promising pedagogy

2011-10-26T17:01:00.000-07:00

I am getting ready for a presentation to Smith in the City -- an event sponsored by Smith for alumnae in NYC. I will give a talk on the achievement gap and I will have an opportunity to mention the work that we have been doing in Project Coach.

In preparation for the talk, I am attempting to identify three key and essential research studies that provide robust explanations as to why the achievement gap persist. One of the studies that I've been reviewing is the Betty Hart and Todd Risely study that was done in Kansas in the early 1980s trying to understand if there were differences in language use in the homes of professionals, working class, and poor families. Hart and Risely followed preschool aged children around their homes with tape recorders and recorded every sound, utterance, word, and sentence. The core finding of their study is sometimes knows as the The Early Catastrophe: The Thirty Million Word Gap by Age 3, which refers to the gap between the vocabularies of welfare and professional families by age four. This number came from the data that showed welfare children heard, on average, 616 words per hour, while children from professional families (essentially children with college educated parents) heard 2153 words per hour.

While reading up about the study, I came across a well-done NPR report that interviewed Betty Hart about her work. The reporter quoted Betty Hart describing how she felt after she had crunched the numbers,

"And personally, Hart says, seeing those numbers staring back at her on the page made her more than demoralized. "Horrified might be a better word," she says. "Horrified when you see that the differences are so great, and you think of trying to make up those differences. I mean, the image that you have is of running after a train. You just look at it and say, you know, 'it's hopeless.'"

The reporter then asks, "But is it hopeless?" The report then turns to describing a research project conducted by Alan Mendelsohn, an associate professor of pediatrics at New York University School of Medicine.

Mendelsohn's study is brilliant and relevant to Project Coach. Essentially, Mendelsohn reviewed countless studies that attempted to teach parents how to provide poor children with language-rich environment. This includes flooding the home with books and toys, to giving parents workshops on reading to children, to modeling what good practice looks like. All these work -- sort of, but not really. What Mendelsohn did was videotape mothers with their children. The mothers watched themselves and analyzed their modes and frequency of interaction with their children. Here is the transcript from the NPR Report:

The first was a video taken with a mother and her baby early on in the program. On the screen, a mother and her 2-month-old were given a mirror to play with. The mother patiently held the mirror to the child, but didn't say much.

"The mother is holding the mirror up to the child, but is not really paying that much attention to the child," Mendelsohn says. "She's not talking to the child. She's not looking to see when the child is interested."

And so, after making a video like this, the child development specialist will show it to the mother herself and suggest ways that she might behave differently: Use the mirror to talk to the baby about reflections, or the color of eyes, use the mirror to engage the baby.
Following Words With Actions
It is these micro-behaviors that add up to macro-differences, Mendelsohn says. To all the millions of words Betty Hart's children were missing, he points to the study's results.

"Mothers had roughly a doubling in the amount of certain kinds of labeling activities," Mendelsohn says. "And a 50 percent increase in the degree to which they reported that they talked about the events in the child's life ... and what was going on in the surroundings of the child." (Here is a link to Mendelsohn's full study "Primary Care Strategies for Promoting Parent-Child Interactions and School Readiness in At-Risk Families The Bellevue Project for Early Language, Literacy, and Education Succes."

In Project Coach we use videotape with out teen coaches. If we want them to be getter communicators there is no better tool then them seeing themselves communicating: projecting, mumbling, or somewhere in between. We have never tested our hypthesis, but I believe that the video analysis provides the effective tool we have for changing behavior and providing a pedagogy to build skills around these capacities such as attitude, communication, initiative-taking, and more. As Mendelson said so beautifully, "these micro-behaviors that add up to macro-differences."

Here is a quick video of a coach running a post-game huddle. The quality is flat out crappy, but when you get past the absurdly bad videography, there is much to mine for meaning. Our process-- when we do it right-- involves showing it to the coach and to the other coaches. We'll sometimes use rubrics and ask the coaches to appraise their colleague's work. Other times we'll use a simple protocol:

a. Find something you want to celebrate. What good is going on? NOTE: This question provides affirmation, but there is something analytical that happens when you have to identify a positive quality and put into words.

b. Find something specific that you think the coach needs to work on to get better the next time?

Coaches Jon and Charlie Visit Emerson College with Redshirt Tom

2011-10-25T19:38:00.000-07:00

This year in Project Coach, there has been a focus on goal setting. Every two weeks, our high school Blue Shirts submit S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-specific) goals to their Red Shirts. The process of talking about, writing down, and then submitting the goals to someone else significantly increases the likelihood of success in completing them. Coupled with a bevy of other support systems in place, our high school blue shirts have already achieved tremendous feats – from bringing a failing course grade to a B+ in a two-week span, to getting an A- on a challenging Chinese exam. These goals are working towards a greater goal that goes beyond success in their high school classrooms. For most of our Blue Shirts, the ultimate goal is to attend college. All of the smaller goals that they set along the way are steering them in that direction, though it can be easy to lose sight of what the long-term goal looks like in the moment.

This past Saturday, two of the Blue Shirts took the opportunity to see this long-term goal close-up in a trip to Emerson College for its admissions open house. Coach Charlie and Coach Jon got a taste of what it is like to go to college at Emerson. They sat in on panels of students discussing their paths to college, got overviews of specific visual-media arts curricula from department chairs, met with athletic coaches, and toured the dormitories across campus. All along the way, Jon and Charlie had the powerful experience of coming face-to-face with their end goal and meeting people at an institution that could help them to get there.

Responding to the NY Times

2011-10-20T17:53:00.000-07:00

The NY Times ran a story that examined how NYC schools have stripped away physical education programs to near nothing. The article asserts that the combination of dwindling budgets combined with the intense pressure to raise academic achievement has resulted in reductions of all subjects and disciplines that are conventionally viewed as ornamental or extra: art, music, and physical education.

The focus of the article is on how some schools have tried to preserve a semblance of phys ed by devising entrepreneurial and creative programs that function outside the typical flow of the school day and budget:

But some teachers and principals have gotten creative to prioritize movement during the school day, stretching money, space and time to fit in exercise wherever they can.

After reading the article, Sam Intrator and Don Siegel were inspired to write a letter to the editor of the NY Times. We don't know whether it will be published, but we share it below (letters are limited to 150 words, so there is clearly more to say).

Dear Editor:

Kids need to move. It’s good for their brains, their bodies, and their spirit. At a time when school physical education programs are being cut because of tight budgets and the pressure to prioritize academics, we need entrepreneurial approaches that keep children running and playing. In Springfield, MA, where many children get only 40 minutes of physical education per week, we run an after school program called Project Coach.

Our idea is simple: high school students can be wonderful sport coaches if they are prepared and supervised. Our teenage coaches run after school sport leagues for elementary-aged children. Teenagers need work that is meaningful. They also need jobs (we pay our coaches). They also bring a special charisma and energy to sports that the elementary students adore. Our teenagers learn to lead because coaching is about inspiring, solving problems, planning, improvising and more. The children move, play, and learn.

Sam Intrator and Don Siegel
Co-Directors of Project Coach and Professors at Smith College
http://projectcoach.smith.edu/

Finding Time for Fitness: PC and Physical Activity

2011-10-13T19:04:00.000-07:00

A buzz of energy fills the room - feet bouncing, hands tapping, chairs shuffling. “When are we going outside?” a girl asks after chasing her friend around the room and under the desks. We start Project Coach academic tutoring at 3:20 PM. Not surprisingly, after a full six and a half hour school day, the kids are dying to run around.

An hour later, we rush out to the fields. The pent up energy is released as soccer balls fly by, feet run towards the goal, and children yell to their friends for a pass. The kids who caused behavioral problems in the classroom smile as they chase after the ball.

The soccer players from Gerena, Brightwood, and Lincoln elementary schools in Springfield do not get much time to exercise during the school day. According to the Springfield Public Schools website, elementary school students participate in physical education for only 40 minutes a week.

Springfield’s children are not the only ones being deprived of the opportunity to play and compete. The New York Daily just published an investigative news story about an audit of NYC elementary schools that found while “about 40% of city kids are obese or overweight, schools aren't providing the required physical education classes.” NYC guidelines prescribe that students from kindergarten through third grade should have daily gym classes, totaling at least 2 hours of physical education each week, and that none of the 31 schools audited by the Controller’s office were in compliance.

Coach Joe Wray, a senior at Central High School and one of the experienced teenage coaches at PC, spent most of Wednesday’s game time working with two misbehaving fifth-grade students who needed some individual attention. During a post-game conversation, he overheard that the kids only attend P.E. twice a week for 20 minutes. “That explains a lot right there.”

School	Location	Public/Private	# of minutes of Gym per Week
Gerena Elementary	Springfield	Public	40 minutes
Brightwood Elementary	Springfield	Public	40 minutes
Lincoln Elementary	Springfield	Public	40 minutes
Smith College Campus School	Northampton	Private	120 minutes
Jackson Street School	Northampton	Public	80 minutes

Coach Joe’s observation about the link between behavior and activity is one lens through which to view the benefits of Project Coach. Another involves the fundamental health benefits linked to ongoing and intensive physical activity. Guidelines issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have even more ambitious targets to get young people moving. The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans is a report designed to provide information and guidance on the types and amounts of physical activity that provide substantial health benefits. Here are the findings on children and adolescents:

Children and adolescents should do 60 minutes (1 hour) or more of physical activity daily.

Aerobic: Most of the 60 or more minutes a day should be either moderate- or vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity, and should include vigorous-intensity physical activity at least 3 days a week.
Muscle-strengthening: As part of their 60 or more minutes of daily physical activity, children and adolescents should include muscle-strengthening physical activity at least 3 days of the week.
Bone-strengthening: As part of their 60 or more minutes of daily physical activity, children and adolescents should include bone-strengthening physical activity at least 3 days of the week.

At Project Coach we take seriously the importance of getting children moving and having our sessions promote the range of physical activities identified as critical to health. In fact, last year a research study investigated the intensity of activity in a Project Coach session. Our coaches had kids moving through a range of activities that were aerobic, muscle-strengthening and bone-strengthening. The accelerometers that we used to track the intensity of movement reported that the elementary-aged players were only sedentary for 4.2 minutes out of the hour. To read more, see our pilot study.

By Taylor Stevens and Katie Joyce

A sweeping glance at the first two weeks!

2011-10-06T05:50:00.000-07:00

So far, it’s been a great first couple of weeks at ProjectCoach. Our blue-shirt high school coaches have stepped up big to plate, showingtremendous leadership with the elementary students both on the field and inthe classroom (or, in the case of Brightwood elementary, in the basementcafeteria!)

As we’ve mentioned earlier, Project Coach is thrilled to be extending it’simpact in the lives of the 130 elementary students that participate in the program in Springfield’snorth end. For the first half of our sessions on Wednesdays and Fridays, a spirited team of redshirts, blueshirts, elementary schoolteachers fuse together totutor, teach and encourage sports literacy. Injust the past few weeks at Brightwood elementary, we’ve accomplished incrediblethings! From mastering multiplicationtables with the third graders, to readingJackie Robinson’s sports biography to fidgety fourth-graders, to facilitating afiery session of sports trivia, our blue shirts have exhibited their remarkableknack for connecting with their players.

On deck for next week, thanks to one of our enthusiastic Brightwood teachers, we'll start afternoon sessions with a short yoga lesson, giving students a time to stretch out the mid-afternoon squirminess and focus on their schoolwork. Can you say Namaste!?

On the fields, gleeful shouts, joyful laughs, and whetted whistles compete to be heard. As the teams have begun to bond and gel, parleying over team names and huddle cheers, it feels like we're sinking in to the season. Today, during the closing huddle with the Bluejays, the third grade team from Brightwood, I couldn't tell-- was it the crispness of the fall air or the warmth of our now-familiar huddle that gave me chills, when Xaiver, the Jays' smallest player with the biggest grin, congratulated the rest of his team for the "awesome teamwork we did today." After Coach Bryant counted them off, "Teamwork on three, Jays! ONE TWO THREE," the erupted roar of "teamwork" is still ringing in my ears.

Video by Ashley Niles
Story by Cait Scudder
Project Coach Graduate Fellows 2011-12

Meet the Blueshirts! Practicing for Perfection in 2011

2011-09-27T19:27:00.000-07:00

9/17/11

It was an awesome day for Project Coach Saturday on the fields at Smith College. It wasn’t just the flawless weather though that made this day so special; it was the tremendous effort and enthusiasm of the Project Coach Blueshirts that really shined through.

The 2011 Project Coach cohort was in the classroom all morning, honing their coaching philosophies in both small and large group settings, discussing different hypothetical coaching dilemmas and how to handle them. The Blueshirts then took the theory and knowledge they had been covering in the classroom, and took it directly to the fields. They were thrown into the deep end, tasked with running a number of small-sited games for a ferocious team of six-year-olds, which was their first experience working with kids this season.

As we have come to expect in Project Coach, the Blueshirts rose to the challenge. While it was a little bit difficult for the new coaches to get right in and lead the youth groups, our veteran Blueshirts stepped up big time, and set an example that all coaches could strive to achieve. All the coaches, old and new, brought phenomenal attitudes to the fields. This was evidenced by the wave of smiles that flooded the fields all afternoon- from players, coaches and even parents!

After the youth team had left the fields, Blueshirts and Redshirts together gathered to support Smith College’s soccer team and enjoyed some great pizza for lunch. It was very special to see what all of our Blushirts were capable of, and we couldn’t be more excited to kick off the year with the kids from Gerena, Lincoln and Brightwood!

Story by Tom Messinger

Video by Jason Anderson

Photos by Tayor Stevens

All proud 2011-12 PC Graduate Fellows!

Could Adults You Know Pull This Off?

2011-09-25T07:22:00.000-07:00

By Sam Intrator, Project Coach

Think about your colleagues in the workplace or some of the adults in your family. Put into mind three adults that you would describe as effective and productive in the circles they inhabit such as the workplace, community, and family. Imagine them as the lead 'coach' in the video below? Could he or she organize an hour of improvised activity in cramped basement space for 36 third, fourth, and fifth graders? What about if I told you this was a Friday afternoon after the kids had spent 8 hours in a classroom?

Let me add some context:

It’s a Friday afternoon in late September and they have agree to serve as a youth sport coach for elementary-aged children. The program involves meeting children at their school. These children attend schools that provide what is called “extended day,” which is a policy initiative designed to provide more academic instructional time as a way to catch kids up. The school has no gym space so children have little opportunity to move or play during their seven hour school day.

At 3:30 coaches arrive at the school and because the priority remains providing academic support, the first responsibility of the coach is to work with several colleagues and provide homework help and academic enrichment to the elementary-aged students. After a grinding week of school and an extended day of being in the classroom-- imagine the simmering energy of these third, fourth and fifth graders. The coaches provide some snacks and then provide some homework help and academic enrichment.

If you can imagine a vat of water on the stove right before it heats to boiling. Bubbles churn up, steam rises, and the lid rattles. Each passing moment more bubbles froth about in random, patternless surges of energy. Yep-- that pretty much describes a classroom of kids on Friday. The promise and anticipation of sport and activity keeps the lid from completely blowing off. The typical plan is to bring them across the avenue to an outdoor field complex for soccer; however, the remnants of a Noreaster have been lashing the city all day and outside activity is not an option.

Now back to those adults that you were imagining. How many would have the patience and energy to keep kids occupied in the classroom?

It’s 4 PM in the schools and a cell phone vibrates. One of the coaches picks up and it’s the Program Director. “Slight change in plans, the gym at the middle school across the street is closed. You have to keep them occupied until 5:30 dismissal.”

Just to recap: the elementary students are now working on 8 hours of classroom time on a Friday. It is the first day of a sport program and they had been told, “we’re going to the gym for sports at 4:15!” I guess I would describe the situation as daunting. Here is what transpired:

Our coaches are not adults. They are teenagers and here is what they did. I believe they deployed a repertoire of skills and capacities that we want any of our adult colleagues to possess when facing a thorny and difficult situation:

Once they found out the gym was closed they quickly consulted with school people and talked with them about whether they could bring the 36 children down to a narrow basement space. They had prepped a soccer coaching plan, but they figured that they could use the space to do some movement activities. The supervisors in the program watch the teenage coaches problem solve on the fly and intentionally retreat from the foreground. They watch the teenagers exercise problem solving skills, negotiation skills, and make quick and confident decisions.

Thirty-six children, 12 teenagers, and two supervisors clomp down into the basement space and they begin to play versions of the old playground standby, “Red Light, Green Light: 1, 2, 3.” They add dance steps and silly movement sequences into the game. They break the 36 children up and have a team competition where each high school coach has a team of four. The energy surges, the noise level bounces off the basement walls, and the coaches deploy little tricks of keeping a crowd of kids engaged, but sensibly feeling when the energy level is surging too high.

The elementary aged players are dripping sweat. They are smiling. They are high-fiving the teenagers, they are cheering on their teammates, and groaning dramatically when they march back to the starting line after being caught in a red-light, green-light transgression.

Back to my original question: how many adults do you know could pull this off? I know some, but one of the propositions of Project Coach is that teenagers have unique gifts that allow them to thrive in the role of youth sport coach. These gifts such as energy, coolness, ability to build rapport, passion for sports-- are raw and we work hard to develop a skill set that allows them to work with children. It’s a winning combination.

The video highlights some of the core capacities or supercogntivies we try and teach. By supercognitives we mean achievement capacities-- which often get labelled pejoratively as non-cognitives or soft skills. We endow them with the prefix “SUPER” because in enacting a soft skill such as ‘communication’ you not only have to do the cognitive work upstairs, but you have then have to go public and do something. In other words, having an idea about what you should say is flat out easier than having that idea and then having to articulate it to people and in doing so make judgements and decisions about tone, audience, pacing, modulation, and more!

Xavier and Kiana, the two coaches most visible in this clip are enacting a range of these supercognitives (link to read more @ the supercognitives):

Initiative: Rather than waiting passively, passing the buck, or drifting to the background. The team of coaches came together, devised a way forward, and made something happen. Reed Larson (link to pdf of his article) highlights initiative as the ability to be motivated from within to direct attention and effort toward a challenging goal. In addition to being an important quality in its own right, I believe that initiative is a core requirement for other components of positive development, such as creativity, leadership, altruism, and civic engagement.
Communications: They are projecting with their voice, deploying a range of non-verbals and tuning it towards their rambunctious audience.
Teammwork: They quickly devise roles for themselves and switch-- often seamlessly-- letting the focal person change over time.
Problem Solving: Clearly they perceived that something needed to be done. Something was awry in the program and

We started as a lemonade stand on the corner, now we're going global (sort of)....

2011-09-19T13:04:00.000-07:00

Sam Intrator, Project Coach

As with most out-of-school programs, we began as a lemonade stand. Entrepreneurial in spirit, we launch with an idea, a sense of anticipation, and unspoken belief that our intentions are noble, our idea was distinctive, and that we have the skill and perseverance to run a lemonade stand on the corner. Metaphorically, after a few sales and some encouragement-- we start to dream. How can we expand? What else can we offer? What if we were to move to a busier corner and attract more business? In short, the story of Project Coach and so many of our sibling programs -- we start out in the garage or on the corner with a handmade sign, "Lemonade $1" and end up as a 'real entity' with all the promise and complexity of being big.

As we are getting ready to launch PC 7.0 this fall, one of the exciting additions to the PC Lemonade Stand involves us launching an academic enrichment experience for the elementary-aged players that participate in our sport leagues. The core of the initiative involves providing an hour of academic experience at the schools before the players head over to the athletic facilities for their sport experience.

What do we do with that time? Our plan has two elements: first, we want to provide opportunity for the PC team to provide homework help. When we met with the elementary school principals about how to use the time, they lobbied for us to use the time for homework help. As one principal said, “having extra time to support students with their homework would be a great asset to the children and their families.” We agreed, but we also -- in the spirit of always trying to connect to our touchstone-- “using sports as a vehicle to promote academic, social, and community growth”-- we reached for a more ambitious idea.

We are amidst planning to launch a sport-themed children’s book project that would involve developing a series of lessons that would focus on literacy, book chats, and on themes naturally unfold from the realm of sports: perseverance, what does it mean play fair, playing on a team, the role of practice in getting good at anything, and more. Our curriculum planning is underway, but Greg Rosnick piloted this venture a few years ago and wrote about for our blog and presented what he learned at a Smith College Collaborations conference.

As I think about how we expanded and developed this initiative, I sense that we relied more on our intuitive sense of how to give ourselves the best shot at success. How can we deploy our resources so that our academic program could be a successful complement to what we already do in the gym? We sat down and planned what the program should look like, but there is a robust literature on the linkage between academic achievement and out-of-school time. We didn’t necessarily consult the literature prior to our initial planning, but since we are still in the planning phase, here is what we would have learned:

In a speech delivered to a assemblage of educational and business leaders in Springfield, MA, Geoffrey Canada shared his metaphor of the train -- which he used to explain what he called the “physics and math of the achievement gap.” He describe two trains leaving Springfield. One train left at 8 a.m. heading south. A second train leaves at 1 p.m. also traveling South. His question, “both trains are traveling at the same rate, when would the second train catch the first train?” His answer was sobering, “the physics and math of this problem are simple-- train B will never catchup.”

His meaning is indelible: poor children can’t catchup to middle class children without speeding up the train or running train B longer. In other words, to hearken back to Aesop's fable of the tortoise and the hare. Can a tortoise running slow and steady for longer spans of time catch up?

One policy intervention that has been adopted by a number of reform entities involves extended time, which entails adding time to the school year or school day as a way to improve achievement. This logic of this approach hinges on the the axiom, “more time on task.” This approach is both promising, but like many policy initiatives carries with it some unintended consequences as Patall et al (2010) point out in there systematic review of research on the effects of extended day.

Potential positive effects for students

Increased learning and better academic achievement
More time for learning
More repetition of material; deeper coverage of curriculum
More time on task
More opportunities for experiential learning
Deepened adult–child relationships

Potential negative effects for students

Wasted time (allocated time does not necessarily translate to increased instruction)
Increased fatigue and boredom and decreased effort
Increased absenteeism and drop-out rates
Less time for informal learning, extracurricular activities, student employment, and free time

Our PC Academic Initiative strives to dance a balance. We are increasing time for learning and focusing on academic outcomes but connecting it to our PC Sport curriculum. We will address literacy elements, but do so through processes and content that students would not necessarily experience during the school day.

This begets the question: if merely extending the school day does not uniformly lead to better outcomes, then what features should be in place in an out-of-school program that strives to move the needle on academics?

Lauer (2006) and her colleagues conducted a meta analysis of studies that examined the impact of out-of-school programs on academics. They only included studies that included a direct assessment of students’ academic achievement in reading, mathematics, or both. Examples included classroom assessments, standardized tests, and grades in subject areas research and evaluation on out-of-school programs that strive to address academics. Several of their conclusions are of import to our efforts:

OST programs can have positive effects on the achievement of at-risk students in reading and mathematics.
OST programs need not focus solely on academic activities to have positive effects on student achievement. Study results indicate that OST programs in which activities are both academic and social can have positive influences on student achievement. This finding supports the belief that OST programs should address the developmental needs of the whole child.
Duration of academic component does not matter as much as strong implementation. In other words, high quality instruction can be done in small dosages.
OST programs that provide one-on-one tutoring for at-risk students have postive effects on student achievement in reading. This was one of the strongest findings from the meta-analysis and is supported by other research on tutoring of at-risk students during the school day

Lauer et al’s findings corroborate many of the other reports and studies that emphasize what programs can do to help students develop academically. The two elementsthat Lauer does not emphasize as much as other researchers do involves the significance of having engaging content that is distinctive from school content and developing alignment and coordination with the school.

So as we ready to launch, I feel we’ve designed a program that entails many of the elements identified by the research as being important to successfully improving academics:

Research-Based Practice & Our Plan in Project Coach

Focus on academics through an engaging and interesting approach that is distinctive from the syntax and flow of school. Our sport-themed children’s book curriculum will be intriguing both in terms of content, but also because it will be taught by our high school coaches and college students.
Focus on instruction and delivery not just duration of program. We have been developing a unique curriculum and we will have professional development sessions for coaches each week where we will address delivery of the program.
Adapt instruction to individual and small-group needs. Use one-on-one tutoring if possible; otherwise, break students into small groups. Our ratio will be one PC Staff member for every three students. Each team will have 12 elementary students, 2 teenage coaches, and 1 Smith student. This ratio should provide ample opportunity for
Align the out-of-school time (OST) program academically with the school day and coordinate staff. We have worked with the elementary-school principals to identify teachers to guide our work in the classroom. The close coordination between staff will hopefully yield coordination around academics and other important outcomes.

References:
Lauer, P. A., Akiba, M., Wilkerson, S. B., Apthorp, H. S., Snow, D., & Martin-Glenn, M. (2006). Out-of-school-time programs: A meta-analysis of effects for at-risk students. Review of Educational Research, 76(2), 275-313.

Patall, E. A., Cooper, H., & Allen, A. B. (2010). Extending the school day or school year: A systematic review of research (1985-2009). Review of Educational Research, 80(3), 401-436.

Launch day, savvy teens, and snap judgements

2011-09-17T05:30:00.000-07:00

By Sam Intrator, Project Coach

Yesterday we launched our opening session of the Project Coach Academy. First sessions are pivotal. They remind me of a line from a novelist talking about how long he worked at revising the first line of his latest work. He said something like, “first lines are portals to this world that I’ve created.” Well first sessions are portals to our program’s world. First sessions launch our world and here is a short list of what we aspired to do!

Introduce new coaches to the Project Coach Way
Build the spirit or the culture that will enable us to work together
Introduce the core and essential skills that anchor our program
Communicate the standards and boundaries that will guide our work
Model the nature of how we will interact together
Begin to connect and bring to life those relationships between staff and youth that function as the white blood cells of an organization like ours.

I’m a big believer in that teenagers are savvy consumers with highly evolved and developed sensibilities. They grow up in a culture where people are ‘selling to them all the time’ so they are accustomed to making decisions about what has value and what is valueless. I also think that they have highly nuanced decision making prowess, they tend to look at a product, a class, a person, a situation -- appraise its attributes and then churn out a crude decision:

“Dude, that suck!”
“That was so boring.”
“That was awesome.”

No nuance, subtlety, or gradations. I tend to believe young people operate with a binary system of evaluation: fail or pass. We’re not like the Apple app store where you get to rate on a scale of 1-5. So, as we launch Project Coach-- we have the chance to sell ourselves, showoff our gadgetry, communicate our utility, evoke a sense of promise in an effort to be designated of worth by the young people we intend to serve.

Let me raise the stakes even more: Not only do these initial valuations matter, but they may happen in a blink. When David Brooks reviews the research on first impressions, the findings from the realm of neuroscience ratchet up the pressure. He tells that our judgments spill our fully formed in milliseconds: “Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov of Princeton have found that people can make snap judgments about a person’s trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness and likability within the first tenth of a second. These sorts of first glimpses are astonishingly accurate in predicting how people will feel about each other months later. People rarely revise their first impression, they just become more confident that they are right. In other research, Todorov gave his subjects microsecond glimpses of the faces of competing politicians. His research subjects could predict, with 70 percent accuracy, who would win the election between the two candidates.”

Willis and Todorov found that we respond intutitively to faces in ways so fast and rapid that our rational, reasoned, critical thinking mind has little contribution to our decision. Todorov says, "We decide very quickly whether a person possesses many of the traits we feel are important, such as likeability and competence, even though we have not exchanged a single word with them. It appears that we are hard-wired to draw these inferences in a fast, unreflective way." There is that saying, "who and what is the face of your program?" I guess this suggests that 'our face' matters to whether people will like us, trust, believe in us.

So we have microseconds to prove our worth. “No pressure there!” Even if we have a longer span of time, the research suggests that the first impression is substantially durable and important. So the pressure is on-- those first impressions matter and for what it’s worth, my advice is to intensively prepare so you feel like you can control the message that young people get about your program, but then I have a hunch it comes down to something like this.

One of our veteran teen coaches walks into the room alongside one of the new recruits. As he walks in he catches a glimpse of our program director and he lights up and they greet each other with a warm hand clasp. “How is it going,” asks the program director with a warm and effusive smile. “Going great,” says the veteran. “I’ve been to school everyday this week.” I watched the newbie taking this all in and I could literally imagine his brain doing the high-level algorithms that go into a snap judgment. “Is this a place I want to be? Are these people that I can be around? Will I belong?” My sense is that you can design a first day with appropriate ice breakers, snappy handouts, clear expectations, but the spirit and soul of a program is discerned through the currents of connection and relationship that can’t be as easily and intentionally choreographed.

What do you do to make your program launch successfully? How do you think about the crucial and pivotal decision about the 'face' of your program?

Project Coach at Camp Cromwell with BCNY!

2011-07-20T18:55:00.000-07:00

July 20, 2011

During July 2011, the Project Coach team visited the Camp Cromwell, NJ, summer camp of the Boy’s Club of New York, to implement an intensive one-week PC program for urban youth and elementary school-aged participants.

Over the course of the initial intensive training weekend, youth coaches learned the fundamentals of becoming an effective coach and an inspired role-model as they received instruction in the Project Coach Academy curriculum.

Central to the successful implementation of this curriculum were the 2011-12 cohort of new graduate ‘redshirts’, who showed incredible energy and devotion as they forged long-lasting relationships quickly with their young charges.

The true test of the growth of this impressive cadre of youth coaches came during the week, when they led high-energy, action-packed basketball and soccer sessions for over 130 younger members from BCNY.

Special thanks go to Megan Vandeventer, Director of Program Development at BCNY, and the wonderful team of staff in Martinsville, led by Camp Director Fred Guzman. The week proved to be a tremendous success, and Project Coach looks forward to working with BCNY again in the near future.

Check out the thoughts of new PC "redshirts" below....

Jason Anderson:

The PC training in New Jersey was simply awesome. We not only bonded as a grad school cohort, but forged meaningful relationships with all of our teen coaches. Chris, Tyler, Ish, Joe, Joseph, Gabriel, Big B, Claude, Bishop, Apollo, Ruben, Charles and Gris became my friends, and Tom, Ashely, Cait, Brian, Katie, Taylor and Andy became family. Learning, practicing and witnessing the Project Coach model (and philosophy) in action, all of us were forced to think on our feet and really reflect on what makes a strong, positive role model and leader. Every day Andy encouraged us to keep stepping it up, and every day the group went big. None of us were the same at the end of that week and, honestly, I don't know which was more inspiring: watching the transformation of the NYC teenagers, or that of my fellow Smith students. After the epiphany of seeing what can happen in seven days, I know we are all excited for an entire school year in Springfield. I can't wait to get started.

Tom Messinger:

I was incredibly impressed with the coaches from BCNY we got the opportunity to work with at Camp Cromwell this weekend. The coaches came in mature beyond their years and already living the core principals of the Project Coach curriculum, yet they still poured everything they had into the training, and improved by leaps and bounds. It was very powerful for me to see that by the second day working with the elementary school kids, all three of the BCNY coaches I was working close with were ready to take over and lead their own teams without my assistance, which is not an easy task whatsoever. They all were willing and eager to step up to the challenge and accept responsibility, and they all succeeded. My only regret is that we will not have an opportunity to continue our work with the BCNY Coaches in the immediate future, but I have no doubt that these young men will be such positive influences in their clubhouses, communities and families.

Brian Quadrozzi:

The past week spent at Project Coach in Martinsville, NJ was eye-opening to say the least. Maybe not so much for me, as I have come from that place and have continually beared witness to the fact that success and the ability to succeed in life both in confidence and ability is not entirely dependent on ones social economic status, but rather on a person's innate ability to recognize that greater opportunities await them - if they want them. The young men from inner city NYC proved this to me beyond a doubt. They all recognized that in order to succeed - both in the program and in life, one must possess a "fire", a burning desire to prove to oneself, and those around you, that simply - you can. You can "change your stars' , you can put yourself on a trajectory that will empower you with a sense of discipline, responsibility, and committment - that will blur the lines between one's academic and personal lives. Hopefully through the sports empowerment programs that we ran all this week - they have realized that.

On a personal note, the young men we were working with really inspired me. They inspired me with their lack of a "woe is me" attitude that seems to permeate people who come from the inner city. No one complained, no one made excuses - and my coach specifically, who I found out had both lost a father and a role model back to back - but you would have never known. These kids were stronger than I ever could have imagined.

Katie Joyce

The Project Coach training at Camp Cromwell was an incredible success. The teenage coaches from the Boys Club of New York impressed us all with their maturity, willingness to challenge themselves, and ability to develop such strong coaching skills over the course of only a week. The Project Coach curriculum brought out the best in the coaches by helping them to work together, to encourage each other, and to critique themselves in order to improve. The experience of helping to train the coaches at Camp Cromwell built my own confidence in my abilities as a mentor for high school students. Our week together enabled me get to know and to learn from my fellow gradate student. I am very enthusiastic about the upcoming year where we will work together in Springfield.

Project Coach Fellows - Week One Recap

2011-07-19T13:15:00.000-07:00

During the first week of their Project Coach experience, new Fellows were immersed in a variety of different activities designed to orientate them to the program, its goals, and its values. As a part of this, they also had the opportunity to spend some time with six veteran PC youth coaches, as well as learn some valuable teambuilding and ice-breaking activities from Coach Mike Dean.

Their thoughts on an action-packed first week can be found below. Full biographical information on the 2011-12 cohort can be found here.

Jason Anderson:

Last Thursday was a big one for us PC Fellows. The morning's team-building games were fantastic. I probably learned more about my cohort in two hours than I had in the previous two days. Mike did a great job of involving everyone and keeping things (and us) moving, often literally. Our afternoon CPR-First Aid training was great, as well. Matt made the exercises engaging, boosting our (by that point somewhat fatigued) spirits with humor and positive energy. My favorite part of the day, though, was simply meeting--and getting to hang out with--the Blue Shirts from Springfield. Ish, Loeb, Julian, Hassan, Kiana and Jon were really fun to work alongside, and it made me all the more excited for our time together this upcoming school year.

Caitlin Scudder:

During the two-hour morning session, Mike taught us probably 20 different ice-breaker/introductory games. These games not only got our blood pumping and our mind's firing, a great way to begin the long day we had ahead of us, but it showed us first-hand the effectiveness of such games to really get a group feeling comfortable with each other. Within the first fifteen minutes, we all knew each other's names, hometowns, favorite movie, and a collection of other obscure facts and idiosyncrasies. With Mike directing a leading us, providing clear and confident directions, we gelled instantly, jumping right into the activities and every 'problem' or 'challenge' he placed before us.

With such a productive and engaging morning, emphasizing team-building and activity-learning, we could not wait to meet the coaches. When they all arrived, and we were gathered in a circle, looking quite similar to the smaller circle the fellows began with in the morning, it was time for practice to be put into action. Time to introduce ourselves and get to know one another! I was caught totally off-guard, though, when Brian tossed the ball to me, and asked me to lead the first activity. Talk about being put on the spot! After a milli-second of feeling nervous and uncertain, that feeling quickly disappeared as I looked around the room at all the bright and eager faces looking back at me, and at each other. They just wanted to dive in! And dive in we did. All that morning practice of activity leading had led up to this moment-- time to introduce myself, speak clearly and brightly, name the game, and begin! Needless to say, the introductions flowed easily, producing lots of laughs, smiles and ebullient joy all around. It was an amazing first day. I can't wait for the year to begin!

Taylor Stevens:

My experiences so far in both Project Coach and the MAT program have been really great. I think that doing the CPR class with six of the blue shirts was a really good way to begin our introductions with some of the most involved Project Coach coaches. They all seemed excited to be there, and I hope that they thought that we were going to be fun to work with this year. It was cool to all be on the same level as far as experience with First Aid and CPR, especially since they are going to be much more experienced in the coaching aspect of the program. I am excited to put what we have learned into practice in New Jersey, though I have to admit that I am nervous about being thrown out there to put what we have learned to the test. Last week made me PUMPED about getting to know each of the students, working together with them, and learning a lot from them in many areas.

Katie Joyce:

Our first day meeting as Project Coach Fellows and introducing ourselves to some of the coaches motivated me to learn as much as I can from the many interesting people I will be surrounded by this year. The coaches struck me as a very mature and attentive group of teenagers who paid attention while keeping a good sense of humor during our long CPR training. Their presence made the afternoon much more enjoyable and I am excited to get to know them better in the fall.
I also learned more about our class of fellows during the icebreakers in the morning and realized that we bring many experiences and strong personality traits to the program. I am honored to have the opportunity to work with such a passionate group of people and am looking forward to forming friendships with each of them.

Ashley Niles:

The one word that comes to my mind when I think about PC is, passion. It is clear to me that everyone involved with PC is extremely dedicated to the young people that the program serves. It has become more and more obvious that this program is not primarily about creating better athletes and coaches, but more about creating a better life for the young people involved. Over the past week I have learned that my most important job in this program is to develop strong relationships with the youth coaches. Each day I learn more about my role as a "red shirt" and each day I get more and more excited about beginning to build relationships with the PC participants.

PC returns to Citi Field thanks to the David Wright Foundation!

2011-06-20T09:37:00.000-07:00

June 19, 2011

A little over a year after Project Coach youth made their first outing to Citi Field, Queens, NY, to witness a walk-off Mets victory against the San Francisco Giants, the program returned to the ballpark today to once again engage in a summer highlight-reel trip to see their idols play.

Spirits were high on the journey down I-95 as youth coaches were joined by Program Director Andy Wood and Coach Mike Dean, along with two Project Coach dads, who were able to celebrate Father's Day in style with their proud teens. The PC organization was particularly delighted to welcome Norris Gordon - Physical Director of the Flushing Clubhouse at the Boys Club of New York - and several of his youth participants, to join us on this special day. PC and BCNY will be collaborating on a week-long iteration of Project Coach programming in July at Camp Cromwell, NJ, and the day-trip served as a perfect opportunity for program staff and teens to form relationships ahead of the project.

Arriving in plenty of time to savour the awesome stadium, PC youth took in batting practice and made the most of the plentiful activities at Citifield, including the batting cages and pitching lanes, where aspiring baseball player and rookie coach Julian Santana showed off his skills to fellow coach Zach Johnson. After (several) trips to the concession stands and team store, the PC contingent took their seats in the sun for a tremendous afternoon of baseball from a perfect vantage point in left field.

Although the result didn't go the way of the Mets this year, who dropped the rubber game of the series against the visiting LA Angels despite a crowd-pleasing ninth-inning rally, our coaches left Citi Field in buoyant mood after an action-packed day of great baseball, fun-filled entertainment, and - above all - excellent company. A key premise of Project Coach lies in the value of connecting youth in the program more closely to those critical individuals who are able to guide and lead them through the challenges that they encounter on the path to college and self-fulfillment, and relationship-forming trips such as the visit to the Mets game continue to serve as critical junctures in the social development of our youth.

We are once again indebted to the support, hard work, and generosity of Cathy and Ira at the David Wright Foundation for this incredible opportunity, and thank them for providing such an inspiring experience for our youth coaches.

Andy Wood
Program Director

PC reports high levels of participant physical activity in latest study

2011-05-18T12:22:00.000-07:00

Project Coach’s Use of Actigraph Accelerometers Provides Objective Health Benefits for Youth and Beyond

By: Kathleen Boucher

The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans states that children and adolescents should do 60 minutes (1 hour) or more of physical activity each day. Activity, however, needs to not only be moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) but it also needs to be age appropriate. While Project Coach continually strives to provide a venue to meet such recommendations, the spring of 2011 marked the first year that Project Coach has been able to use state of the art technology, namely accelerometers, to objectively measure its strides. Accordingly, this entry will describe how Project Coach has already been using the accelerometers as well as the far-reaching benefits that such data can have for the many layers of Project Coach as well as the Springfield community at large.

Why is an Accelerometer Useful When Measuring Moderate and Vigorous Physical Activity?

The Center for Disease Control[1] suggests that parents can think about moderate and vigorous intensity in two ways. First, considering a scale of 0 to 10, where sitting is a 0 and the highest activity level is a 10, moderate-intensity activity would be a 5 or 6 and vigorous-activity would be a 7 or 8. During moderate-intensity activity, a child’s breathing would be harder than normal and the heart will beat faster than a normal resting level. Accordingly, during vigorous-intensity activity, a child’s breathing would be much harder than normal and the heart would beat much faster than normal. A second way of thinking about this is if a child walks to school in the morning then she or he is most likely doing moderate-intensity aerobic activity. However, when she runs during recess or is being chased during a game of tag, she is probably doing vigorous-intensity activity. While these are useful measures, they only provide subjective results since an individual can say a child is “probably” engaging in a certain level of activity. Such measurements are further difficult for a sports coach to monitor when she or he has at least nine different children to watch at the same time. Technology has provided ways to aide such measurements.

Over the years, many tools have been developed to provide objective, empirical measurements of physical activity. For example, while a pedometer measures activity in equal-length two-dimensional steps, accelerometers measure random activity on three axes. Research studies[2] have validated the use of Actigraph accelerometers as a useful device for the assessment of physical activity in children. Therefore, accelerometers, in this case worn on a belt on a child’s waist, provide accurate and non-invasive measurements for the amount and intensity of activity. Such data is invaluable to ensure that a program’s practices are not only striving to meet daily activity standards for children, but that those goals can actually and consistently be met. It is for these reasons that Project Coach came to acquire ten Actigraph Accelerometers to help inform their practice.

What Project Coach Did

During this past spring basketball season of Project Coach, eight 5^th grade kids from Brightwood Elementary School in Springfield, Massachusetts wore accelerometers on two separate school days in which they would also attend Project Coach after school. With the help of the school’s PE teacher, Mr. Dalessio, the accelerometers were distributed when the students arrived at school in the morning. The students then proceeded to wear them all day at school and during Project Coach after school. The first trial day, a Tuesday, was a Project Coach practice session and the second trial day, a Friday, was a Project Coach game day. The accelerometers were set to collect data from 9AM-5PM.

How The Accelerometer Data Were Analyzed

Two different procedures were employed to analyze the accelerometer data. Once the data were uploaded using the Actigraph software, total activity counts were computed from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Then, total activity counts were measured during the 4 p.m. -5 p.m. hour when children were participating in Project Coach. Using these two numbers, it was possible to calculate the percentage of activity children had when participating in Project Coach (4 p.m. -5 p.m.) and during each of the hours that they were in school (9 a.m. -4 p.m.). Our first question was how activity during a Project Coach hour compared to activity during a typical hour during a child’s school day.

Second, the raw data were also analyzed using a mathematical algorithm that computed the amounts of sedentary, light, moderate, and, vigorous physical activity children obtained while in school and while participating in Project Coach These categories identify common daily physical activity standards and can therefore be used to determine whether children in our program were getting recommended levels of physical activity.

Results:

The Project Coach Hours

Based on the 3 dimensional activity counts, this study found, 35% of activity that kids got between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. were during the Project Coach (4 p.m. -5 p.m.) time block. Therefore, in the 8 hour time period, 35% of the students’ activity occurs during this 1 hour. As well, Graph 1 shows that, during the Project Coach hour kids get about 3.85 times the activity that they get during a typical hour in school! This suggests that Project Coach provides a venue for physical activity that is not available during the school day. The use of accelerometers thus provides empirical data to depict the extent to which Project Coach kids are relatively more active while at Project Coach practices and game days.

Meet Daily Moderate and Vigorous Physical Activity Requirement

As well, Graph 2a shows that in Project Coach, children’s activity is structured as: 7% sedentary—(1-1.5 METS), 30% (Light—1.5-3 METS), 57% (Moderate—3-6 METS), and 6% (Vigorous—6-9 METS). In contrast, a typical school hour between 9-4 would look like 51% (Sedentary); 39% (Light), 10% (Moderate), and 0.0% (Vigorous). Furthermore, when converted to a minute-to-minute breakdown Graph 2b shows that during a Project Coach hour practice or game, kids are only sedentary for 4.2 minutes and engaged in moderate or vigorous activity for 37.8 minutes.

Overall A Good Pilot Study

Overall the data above do indicate that Project Coach is adding significantly to the amount of physical activity children are getting in a typical day. Because of scheduling, we were on unable to measure the activity levels of Project Coach youth during the 4-5 p,. hour on days when they are not attending the program. However, because of a mix-up in assigning accelerometers to kids, we did manage to collect data from a fifth grader who attended the Brightwood Afterschool Program instead of Project Coach. This participant received 10% of her activity between 4-5 p.m. (contrast with 35% for Project Coach kids). This was also less than she got in an average hour during her school day, which was 14% per hour. During the 4PM-5PM hour, she worked at 1.5 METS, and had the following profile: 63% sedentary, 32% light, and 5% moderate activity. Therefore, during her afterschool hour, she only received 3 minutes of activity that reached a moderate to vigorous activity level (in contrast to Project Coach kids who got nearly 38 minutes). While this was only one participant, it further suggests that Project Coach provides a venue for students to be significantly more active than they would be without Project Coach

Further Implications

Our initial work using accelerometers has a number of important implications for Project Coach. Clearly, the data show that kids in our program are getting significantly more physical activity than they typically get during their school day. The data also provides information about the structure and intensity of activity children obtain during the time they are with us. Using these baseline data, we are now able to provide our coaches with feedback about how what they do in practices and games impacts the activity levels that their players are getting. While the results from this pilot study indicate that they have been doing good work, we think that there is also room for improvement. Next year we will be focusing on increasing the amount of vigorous activity that participants get in Project Coach.

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/everyone/guidelines/children.html

[2] NIH (’08), Actigraph (’02).

The Indispensable Marie Wallace

2011-05-10T13:44:00.001-07:00

When I began going to the Project Coach sessions I would see Marie Wallace occasionally but I wasn't sure who she was; I thought maybe she worked for a Springfield high school. She was enviable at ease, joking with the the Blue Shirts, giving them cookies.

Marie,who just graduated from Smith College and is going on to study at the University of Austin, first became involved with Project Coach in her junior year at Smith College; she was taking one the Sam Intrator's classes, one of Project Coach's directors, and had to incorporate a community based project as part of her class work. She was opposed to taking a class with with Professor Intrator since he hadn't accepted her for a previous project, but she grudgingly accepted to write blogs once a week for Project Coach. She became "very interested in the teenagers, asking them about their grades, what their life was like at school." Then Marie started going down to Springfield more than that days she was required to, helped coordinate tutors to come. She also started an SAT program last fall. She interviewed for the job, got the job and was the co-director with a student from Mount Holyoke. Marie says that the Blue Shirts hated her the entire time but she bribed them with food and they all took the SATs. By the end of last year she was "in love with the program, in love with all of the teenagers" and she would write about her experience at Project Coach in any class that she could, eventually leading her to write her senior thesis on the program.

The following is an interview with with John, who is one of the Blue Shirts Marie worked with, and with Marie, where she discusses the challenges she faced when she began forging friendships with the Blue Shirts, some of her most memorable moments with them, and how her experience at Project Coach has shaped her professional aspirations. We met outside and sat on the grass, Marie had just gotten back from being with some of the Project Coach Blue Shirts and a group of French high school students who were visiting from Marseilles. One of the Blue Shirts had left his cellphone in one of the graduate student's car and called Marie in an effort to retrieve it. She then coordinated the retrieval, calling one student to get the phone number of the student with the car and then in turn calling her before calling back the Blue Shirt with the misplaced phone to reassure him that he would have it back the next day, an example of one of the many things she persistently, dedicatedly, does for Project Coach.

Project Coach Goes French!

2011-04-26T18:08:00.000-07:00

This week marked a historical moment in the history of Project Coach as Red Shirts and Blue Shirts alike welcomed ten students—three girls and seven boys, ages 14-17—from Marseilles, France to take a walk in their shoes for the next three weeks. This cross-cultural youth exchange program, which was sponsored entirely by SportsUnited, a division of the Bureau for Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S Department of State, will specifically aim to train the French students how to become coaches for elementary children in their own hometowns as well as foster meaningful discussions and cultural awareness about various issues regarding racism and discrimination in both countries. Yet, Julie Hooks, who is the Executive Director of the Institute for Training and Development (ITD) in Amherst, MA and Project Director of the exchange program itself, says that above all, we can expect the program to build a number of personal relationships between both sets of youth over the coming weeks—not to mention, well into next year when 10 students from Project Coach travel to France for two weeks to participate in similar activities.

Although the France Sports Initiative is the third exchange program that ITD has developed around youth sports since the organization started in 1985, this is the first program that has actually involved the youth themselves in the training process and cultural awareness activities that ITD seeks to traditionally provide for its visiting participants. Indeed, upon hearing about Project Coach’s success with training Springfield youth to coach and mentor elementary school kids from disadvantaged neighborhoods, Julie saw a unique opportunity to build an exchange sports program that would “bridge cultural gaps” as well as provide its participants with practical coaching skills and information about the importance of youth development sports programs.

In the end, Julie hopes that everyone will come away from the exchange with new perceptions about their current ideas of diversity. One of the main reasons she cites that Marseille was specifically chosen for the exchange was because of its “diverse population” since the community has a fairly large presence of northern African and Muslim immigrants. Thus, it is expected that conversations surrounding controversial issues such as immigrant and minority representation within the French community may crop up over the coming weeks. Additionally, there is also a notable lack of girls’ participation within youth sports programs in France, which is unfortunately evidenced by the fact that there are only three girls that were selected by the Marseille Sports Bureau and U.S. Consulate for participation in the exchange program. Julie hopes this observation will also strike engaging dialogue among the program participants and intrigue them to think about the various ways today’s youth can address these and other important social issues through the world of sports.

By Project Coach Reporter -- Danielle Santos

Will Bangs on how Project Coach led him to teach

2011-04-09T09:43:00.000-07:00

Will Bangs, who now teaches Middle School History and English, was first introduced to Project Coach as a student at Hampshire College when he took one of Sam Intrator's seminar classes. If it weren't for the program, "Sam, Don and Andy", the Project Coach directors, and some of the coaches like Duane, Loeb, Ziggy that he met once he became involved in Project Coach, he would not be teaching today. After graduation from Hampshire, Will went on to obtain his Masters of Teaching degree at Smith College, under the Project Coach fellowship.

During Project Coach sessions, Will helped the Blue Shirts with media production, teaching them storytelling using radio and video through different activities and lessons on Thursday afternoons. The Blue Shirts went through the steps of devising video projects, arranging footage, and interviewing their parents, teachers, and community members. The culmination was a video documented through the coaches' voices, which was sent to a foundation, and who, as a result of watching the video, gave Project Coach a five thousand dollar grant, money that would, in part, go towards the coaches salaries. It was at the point that Will was able to see the tangible result of his involvement in Project Coach.

For his senior thesis, a convergence of education, community organization and video production, Blue Shirts from Project Coach, Sam, Don, Andy and other teenagers he had worked with were brought to his college. Some of the Project Coach Blue Shirts spoke about what being involved in Will's media production projects had meant to them. One coach had been on the brink of dropping out of high school, but in part because of his involvement in Project Coach, he kept holding on, in an attempt to do well in school so that he would be able to obtain a scholarship to persue media production. Project Coach has an "impact on the teens in Springfield but it's also powerful for the college students involved in it". Will is grateful for being in "just the right spot".

From Central High to Harvard Law School: PC on the Road

2011-04-06T10:19:00.000-07:00

April 4, 2011
Harvard Law School, Cambridge MA.

"When are we picking up Sam"? "Which school do we pick up from first"? "Who has the parking pass"?

All part of the usual conversation in the fast-paced, day-to-day operations of an after-school program with an infinite number of moving parts and a plethora of unexpected challenges to navigate. What transpired for the rest of this afternoon - and most of the evening - was anything but 'normal'. A little less than two hours after leaving the parking lot of Central High School in Springfield, MA, the three Project Coach directors and three of their most promising youth coaches were immersed in an enthralling lecture within the hallowed halls of Harvard Law School.

Thanks to the efforts of Allie Canton (Amherst College alum, 2nd year HLS student) and former Project Coach 'redshirt' alum Arianna Miliotis, current blueshirts Joseph Wray, Kiana Figueroa, and Xavier Rosario were treated to an experience unlike any before, as they became special guests of esteemed HLS professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. during a session of the lecture series "Race and Justice". In a unique approach, Professor Ogletree uses topics and scenarios that are dealt with in acclaimed HBO show The Wire to help impress upon students their legal and moral implications. Upon meeting Allie and Arianna, the coaches took their place in the audience, as those present were treated to a soul-stirring recital of the poem "Invictus", amongst other works, by the Young Kings of the Renaissance Charter School in Boston, at the conclusion of which the guest speakers for the evening took their places at the podium.

Heading the panel - as with many sessions during the lecture series - was an actor or actress from the The Wire; on this occasion Sonja Sohn, who plays Detective Kima Greggs. Ms Sohn was joined by the Program Director of "Rewired for Life", a youth development organization located in East Baltimore, and Commander Melvin Russell of the Baltimore PD. Ms Sohn began the panel discussion by describing the inspiring work of "Rewired for Life", for which she - and several cast members from The Wire - devotes considerable time and resources. Citing the need to "reignite the culture of concern in East Baltimore" as the primary motivating factor for her involvement, Ms Sohn described the pressing need for services such as homework help, fitness programs, and community building to help youth and adults alike to see the need to develop relations with those around them. Of particular salience to Project Coach were her remarks around the importance of educating adults in civic engagement to ensure that the values being taught in "Rewired for Life" are replicated and reinforced in the homes of the youth participants.

Commander Russell followed Ms Sohn's impassioned plea for the support of programs such as "Rewired for Life" and Project Coach by describing his twenty-plus years of service to the Baltimore PD in its undercover narcotics division. Wrangling with the notion of retirement after years of frustration at the lack of collaboration between the police and the East Baltimore community, Russell rejected the 'easy path' and decided to devote the remainder of his career to forging better links between his force and local residents, through meaningful discussions around the notions of affordable housing, job creation, and "taking the little, isolated fires of progress" and making one united front for positive development. As a result of these steps, homicides and shootings in the East Baltimore district that Commander Russell heads up fell by a greater percentage than any other district last year.

A moment of particular pride for Project Coach took place soon after, when during the Q & A session that proceeded the panel presentations, Coaches Joseph Wray and Xavier Rosario followed up on an initial inquiry posed by a Boston University professor to ask their own questions of the panelists. Their questions, and the responses from panelists, can be seen below:

However, perhaps the most influential discussion was reserved for the end of the night over pizza, as Project Coach youth quizzed Allie about her choice of career, and the path that she took to Harvard. Coach Joe was particularly captivated by the sense of hard work and devotion that Allie espoused as she debunked the myth that HSL was the sole reserve of the elite and wealthy. Such discussions rolled over into the van ride home, as Joe articulately explained his interest in the legal profession, and the ways that he might go about following a similar route to that of Allie.

Project Coach's sincere thanks go to Allie and Arianna, along with Professor Ogletree and others at HSL for providing us with such a warm welcome!

Andy Wood
Program Director.

Basketball Games

2011-04-03T12:42:00.000-07:00

Blue Shirts shouted "2, 3 defense" and "leave some space" at their players from the sidelines. The session began with the players' practicing their shooting, especially free throws, rebounds, and dribbling. About halfway though the session different teams began competing against each other. Player's made some very impressive shots and the Blue Shirts were also able to see what their players needed to work on. A couple of players had finger jams and sat out for a few minutes but soon returned to their game.

MCAS Stories on Project Coach Radio

2011-03-26T09:47:00.000-07:00

Every Thursday Smith College students drive to Springfield and pair up with Project Coach Blue Shirts to create Project Coach Radio. This week each coach told their own story about test taking, focusing on their MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) experience.

Joseph took the MCAS in tenth grade and he describes it as "long, exhausting, frustrating, pointless and boring". He doesn't think the MCAS is an effective way to test students because there are students who are smart, but are not good test takers. When the Smith student who was interviewing him asked if he could think of any alternatives, he mentioned mid-terms and finals, which each school could be responsible for and would directly test the students on what they had learned in class since "many of the questions [on the MCAS] you haven't studied". He found it frustrating that many of his classes were geared towards test taking rather than what he called "life skills". He wants to learn about "what is out in the world, what is going on in the world thousands of miles away that I have no clue about"'; he wants more than just to learn "stuff about tests". Jo has been taking standardized tests since the third grade, and he says that he approaches the recurrent tests with a "man, this again" attitude and doesn't put in his best effort. Instead he just focuses on getting the test done.

John, on the other hand, had a good MCAS experience since he did really well on the test, especially the Math portion. However, he also found the test tedious; when the Smith student he was working with asked him what kind of background music he wanted to use once they had recorded, he responded, "sobbing music". He thought he was done with standardized tests after the MCAS but then he chose to take the SATs. He did find the SATs to be "long and boring" but explained that the scores he received on the SAT measure "how well you are doing, how well you are learning". His goal is to obtain a score of above a 500 in ever section of the SATs. He would prefer to be able to take the test later in the day, since in the past he has taken it really early in the morning.

When Kiana took the MCAS in seventh grade she was afraid she would fail, but her friends reassured her that it was relatively easy to pass. She recognized most of the material on the test because she had covered it in her classes. However, she explained that people can be placed in the wrong classes if they do not have good test taking skills. Just knowing that it is a test makes her nervous. "There probably is a better way to test students, but no one knows how".

Basketball Season

2011-03-11T20:57:00.001-08:00

On Tuesday Project Coach began its basketball season. Some Blue Shirts had never coached before. Natasha, a new Blue Shirt, said she was excited and nervous to begin. Before the elementary school players came many of the Blue Shirts and a Red Shirt, Kuna, played a game of knock out. Once the fourth and fifth graders from Gerena, Brightwood and Lincoln arrived they were escorted to different gyms where they met with their Blue Shirt coaches. Each of the three gyms was split in half to accommodate all the players who sat down in a circle to play a couple of name games, introducing themselves to each other. The players then got into a huddle on one knee and the Blue Shirts explained the rules of the games they would play which included Shark and Red Light, Green Light. The Blue Shirts would call out corrections to the players like "when you run, always dribble" during the games. After the games the teams who shared gyms lined up and shook each others' hands. While one Blue Shirt commented that he had trouble with the chemistry between some of his players who had brought their fights from school onto the court, the session ran smoothly.

First Aid

2011-03-02T18:26:00.000-08:00

On Monday Aaron Parrish, a Medical Student from Tufts who is working at Baystate, came to Project Coach to give the Blue Shirts some first aid training. Many of the elementary school kids who will be playing basketball this season will complain of jammed finger, sprains, and possibly breaks. Aaron Parrish went through multiple possible scenarios of what could happen and what should be done in each instance. The Blue Shirts then practiced bandage wrapping on each other before finishing off the session by asking Aaron Parrish their questions about being a Medical student.

Blue Shirts Practice Bandage Wrapping

QuestionsMedical School

Blue Shirts teach Student Teachers at Smith College

2011-02-23T20:52:00.000-08:00

In the class “Teaching Methods and Curriculum” at Smith College twenty student teacher who teach a range of different subjects in middle school and high school listened as Project Coach Blue Shirts Efrain, Loeb, Xavier and Ish spoke of their own schools and teachers. Efrain is a senior at Renaissance who takes core classes and was on the swim team last semester. When asked about his school’s weaknesses he said that there was little class selection since only four core classes are offered. Loeb, a junior from Central praised his school’s sports teams and when asked for a weakness he spoke of the high school drop out rate. Xavier, an eighth grader at Chestnut will attend Central next year. Ish is a sophomore at Central. When asked about effective teaching methods, Efrain spoke of his English teacher who held group discussions rather than constant lectures. Loeb’s History teacher writes the goals that he wants to meet by the end of each class, and underneath the big goal he write the smaller steps that they will take as a class to meet that final goal, providing a roadmap for the students.

The Blue Shirts were also asked what teachers should never do in their classrooms. Inconsistency really bothered the Blue Shirts and led to a loss of respect for the teacher. Efrain kept being told in one of his classes that he would be thrown out the next time he misbehaved but he was never throw out so he continues to misbehave because he could easily get away with it. Loeb spoke about teachers yelling. Once a teacher yells at you, you shut down for the rest of the year, he explained. Xavier was bothered by the favoritism that one of his teachers showed another student in class. Since the teacher was also the soccer coach, he favored the soccer player in his classroom. One student teacher voiced how impressed she was by the level of awareness and self-knowledge each of the Blue Shirts demonstrated. When one student teacher asked Ish what his philosophy about going to school is he answered, “School is going to get me somewhere in the long run”.

"See a problem....fix it" -- The PC ethos

2011-02-16T09:20:00.000-08:00

After the first all-staff Project Coach meeting of the new season, a sense of resolve emerged among each of the participants to think deeply about what it takes to form a close, authentic, bond with their youth coaches. Moreover, it became abundantly clear that everyone in the room was unwaveringly committed to this notion: that the strength of this relationship - above all other factors - underpins the success of the program.

With so much of the limited time within the program packed with coach training, sports sessions, and the preparation of PC Radio segments, little opportunity is left for 'redshirts' and their assigned coaches to simply - yet critically - 'get to know each other'.

The email excerpt below embodies the PC-wide notion that if you see a problem, you identify the opportunity to fix it, and implement a solution. We're truly excited to see the results of this new venture.

2/16/11

Dear PC team,

I think we all came away from last night's meeting with a renewed sense of vigor about building authentic relationships with the blueshirts. We were impressed by your desire to invest your time in this process, and accordingly I'd like to run a proposal by you that the three of us are all in agreement with.

We are going to make a small pool of money available for redshirts to utilize when involved in relationship building activities. This could be anything from a movie, to a sporting event (if it's UMASS hockey I expect an invite!), to a birthday lunch, coffee, museum, college trip, etc, etc. I'm sure that as you get to know your group you'll get a sense of what would work best, and in many cases probably already do.

If the event totals less than $50, you can go ahead and plan it without consultation with me, although I'd love to hear about every time we do something like this anyway, so it'd be great if you can informally let me know regardless. For something that is above this amount, we would need to go through it first. My sense is that it would be great to be able to involve as many blueshirts as possible, rather then invest larger amounts on just a few, but we will leave it to your discretion how you manage these aspects. After all, it would be counter-productive to mandate that each redshirt involves each of their blueshirts, if the willingness and desire to do so is not there on either side.

We're excited to launch this, and think it can make a significant and immediate impact; I look forward to hearing from each of you about successful experiences soon!

Andy

Blue Shirts' Awesome Presentations

2011-02-15T15:44:00.000-08:00

For Project Coach's Valentine's Day session, Anna, a Red Shirt, baked cupcakes for everyone. The session began with a brief presentation given by the Red Shirts about some good event in their Blue Shirts' lives. Barbara finished her credit recovery! A video clip of Marquis, a Red Shirt, followed these presentations. The Blue Shirts were asked to comment on the clip. They praised Marquis’ body language; he was able to connect with the entire group of Blue Shirts around him. He maintained eye contact, was laughing, and repeated what he was being told back to the speaker, indicating that he had been listening. Some other clips followed in which the Blue Shirts critiqued the coaches in the clips on their body language and overall communication skills. The most interesting part of the session came towards the end when the Blue Shirts picked up an index card and then gave a presentation to the entire group.

Xavier picked up an index card with the word ‘safety’. He thinks that Springfield needs more police on the streets because, he told the group, there have already been three homicides this year, and the year has just begun. In school he doesn’t feel safe because of the fighting he encounters, kids start fights for no reason, he said, it doesn’t make any sense. When the floor opened up for questions he was asked to pretend he was the principal. If you were your school’s principal how would you make the school safer? Xavier responded that he would ask the teachers for assistance; he would ask the teachers to be on the look out.

Devan picked up the ‘equality and social justice’ index card. The card asked whether he had ever encountered racism or sexism. Devan said he had encountered racism, and proceeded to share his experience through storytelling. His class had been assigned the book “Finding Fish” by Antwone Q. Fisher and one boy in the class would constantly make snide jokes about African Americans. Devan would joke right back at him, but once at home felt like he should of hit him or something, even though he knew that that wouldn’t solve anything. In another instance, when Devan’s class was asked who their role model is, one student responded that his role model was Hitler. Devan didn’t know how to respond. The Blue Shirts' presentations gave everyone an opportunity to apply what they had learned about listening and communicating.

The Pyramid of Success

2011-02-07T18:03:00.001-08:00

When we arrived at Chestnut Middle School Library tables and bookshelves were set up for a book sale. Chairs were moved about for the Blue Shirts to begin their first Project Coach class they will receive high school credit for. The Blue Shirts who wanted to receive credit in addition to being paid were given a contract to read over and sign; their commitment includes coming to the sessions prepared in full uniform, attending all Project Coach sessions and doing their homework for Monday’s Project Coach class.

The class began with a short clip of a children’s basketball session. In small groups headed by Red Shirts, the Blue Shirts critiqued the coaches in the clip. The Blue Shirts praised the coach who was using his loud ‘coach voice’ and had the kids listening. They criticized the coach who did not make eye contact with the children and the lack of movement during the session since only two kids were handing the ball at a time, leaving many of them with nothing to do but wait in line. When asked for how they would improve the session, one coach said she would split the kids in half, circle them up and lower herself to their eye level to explain the game rather than have them in a line while she explained and demonstrated. One Blue Shirt said he would have joined in and integrated himself into the game as another player. Another Blue Shirt suggested giving each kid a ball. A six-year-old kid does not go to practice to stand in line. When one coach was asked to put herself in a six-year-old boy’s shoes she said she would want to go to practice to have fun and play ball.

The Blue Shirts’ critique of the clip was followed by a mini-lesson on the Power of Three. Blue Shirts wrote down three reasons the city of Springfield benefits from Project Coach; they were then asked to stand up and use their ‘coaching voices’ and present to their peers.

The lesson shifted gears when the Blue Shirts were shown a video about Coach John Wooden. Taking the men basketball team at UCLA which won eighty eight consecutive games under Coach Wooden as an example, each Blue Shirt wrote down what they thought made a team successful. They were then given a handout on Coach Wooden’s 'Pyramid of Success' and prepared to explain a component of the pyramid in front of everyone. Everyone stood up and the Blue Shirts began to lay down the foundations of the pyramid, explaining what they believed Enthusiasm, Cooperation, Loyalty, Friendship, Initiative, Alertness and Self Control meant to them and to their teams.

Once you go car shopping you notice everything: Osmosis vs. Explicit Teaching

2011-02-06T08:18:00.000-08:00

By Sam Intrator

What does shopping for a car have to do with Project Coach, William James, John Dewey, and high schoolers giving a minispeech to elementary students?

This morning I read a 2003 NY Times article profiling Lucy Calkins-- who is a professor of education at Teachers College at Columbia University. Her highly influential work focuses on writing instruction and preparing teachers to teach writing in their classrooms. She is quoted in this piece about what happens when children believe they are active and serious players in a writing community. She says,

''My husband and I are going to buy a car soon,'' Mrs. Calkins says. ''Whenever I drive now, I find myself noticing the differences between Toyotas and Subarus, Pintos and Chevettes. All my life I have been surrounded by cars, yet until now I have not taken note of the different makes.'' And so it is with children, she adds, who, once they view themselves as members of the writers' club, suddenly notice the conventions of the written language everywhere. Teaching writing skills through writing and editing works infinitely better than the use of drill and workbooks

Calkins describes an assumption that sometimes pervades our work in Project Coach and all educational ventures: we over-champion the idea of learning through osmosis. Osmosis implies that merely being buffeted by the culture one will forge an active schema that can guide thinking and decision making. In other words, because we grow up with cars streaming all around us-- we are car experts, or we attend schools and sit in English class we know how to write and give speeches, or we teach coaches how resolve conflict on their teams in Project Coach and the implication is that they can deploy that skill in another setting.

I'm thinking about this because I am preparing a lesson on communications for tomorrow's session at Project Coach. I want to focus on an element of speaking that coaches use all the time. Maybe we can call it a mini-speech. I want the coaches to think about how they need to develop a quick outline that provides them with three talking points. In our program, we have found that we need to teach and reteach basic fundamentals all the time. At the outset we had assumptions: they played on sport teams so they should know now to give feedback to coaches or their school teaches oral communication so they will know the fundamentals of speech making. Unfortunately, it's a flawed assumption.

There is a difference between osmosis and explicit connections. So here is my takeaway from thinking about cars and Project Coach:

We can surround youth with stimulus just as we are all surrounded by cars of every conceivable make. Merely being the soup is not sufficient. In relationship to Project Coach, just because some of our teen coaches were in the sport soup as players-- that does not mean that they have the 'skills and techniques of coaching." Just because our coaches all articulate the desire to go to college doesn't mean they have developed and refined the skills necessary to make that happen. Legendary psychologist William James talked about the "booming buzzing confusion" of experience. The father of American progressive education, John Dewey, wrote about the unceasing stream of experience that flows past us at all time. Both make the point that merely being exposed to experience is not enough. Meaning must be actively composed and made sense in an explicit fashion. Dewey, who is the master of the compelling image describes random experience as "dispersive, centrifugal, dissipating." In other words experiences stream past us and, for the most part, we don't notice. What must happen for meaning to be achieved is reflection and focus. How we get youth to focus and attend to the elements that we want them to improve up on is the pedagogical dilemma of programs like Project Coach. Ms. Caulkins makes an essential point: youth need to believe that noticing the skills, practicing the skills, talking about the skills has direct relevance to their own life. There is more that needs to happen, but it's a beginning.

Project Coach's Eighth Year Begins

2011-02-02T11:34:00.000-08:00

Veteran coaches, potential new coaches and family members gathered in Chestnut Middle School Library on Monday afternoon to mark Project Coach’s eighth year running. NEON (North End Outreach Program) began the session with a presentation of an array of programs they are offering North End residents this year.

Sam Intrator then gave an overview of the program, indicating what its goals were for this upcoming year as well as its new features. As a college professor he wants students who think critically, communicate their ideas effectively to others and strive to positively impact others’ lives. Project Coach creates an environment in which the Blue Shirts can develop these skills. The Project Coach directors and graduate students each introduced themselves and two veteran coaches briefly spoke of their positive experiences in the program. While students who work as coaches get paid eight dollars an hour, this year, high school credit will also be offered to those coaches who participate in the program. Three Academic Coaches each representing one of the high schools in the area will support the coaches with their academics. Some of the new features of this year’s program include participation in a league where Project Coach teams will compete. Long-term activities pairing the coaches to Smith College students to develop different media projects, including a radio program, are in the works. In addition, students from France will be visiting for two weeks this year. Project Coach Blue Shirts will visit France next year.

One aspect that Project Coach seeks to improve this year is its communication with the Blue Shirts’ parents. Some parents who were present voiced concerns over the lack of contact information they received. After the presentation of the program, students who wanted to become Project Coach Blue Shirts were interviewed. The programs veteran coaches were also present to answer questions. One coach recommended to “always be energetic and make sure to always keep the players moving”; “they love it when coaches become part of the game”.

Intentionally Bridging Youth Communities

2010-12-13T18:53:00.000-08:00

Milbey W. McLaughlin describes the best Community Based Organization as an effective youth organizations having intentional learning environments. The organization develops young people and provides them with high quality activities keeping them involved. The activities are deliberate actions with a strong emphasizes on learning.

On Monday, Project Coach coaches had the privilege of being coached by the Williston Varsity Girls Volleyball Team. For those of you who don’t know about Project Coach and Williston Northampton School; I will give a brief background.

Project Coach coaches are between the ages of 13-18 years old from the North End of Springfield learning to coach youth soccer and basketball coaches. Williston Northampton School is a co-ed college preparatory boarding and day high school in the heart of Pioneer Valley.

We started Monday evening watching video clips of Williston Varsity Volleyball team playing. Then we moved to the gym where the girl’s varsity team split the Project Coach coaches into groups teaching them the skills of bumping, serving, and setting. We ended the session with a couple of competitions (my group destroyed all of the other groups…obviously).

It was cool to see the role reversal of the Project Coach coaches getting coached. After 45 minutes of training, we gathered as a big group and the Project Coach coaches formally met the Williston Girl’s Volleyball team. The Project Coach coaches were able to share their experiences as youth soccer coaches with the Williston Volleyball team. The Williston Volleyball team talked to our coaches about what it was like to be away from home and living at school. They also talked about campus life and rules.

In two hours, two different communities merged and united over a simple game. The night transformed from being a awkward and standoffish to laughs and jokes being told.

I hope Project Coach will have an opportunity to return the favor of going to Williston Girl’s Volleyball teams home turf to teach them how to play soccer or basketball and maybe get a volleyball, basketball, and/or soccer game.

College Access

2010-12-13T18:51:00.000-08:00

Carol Miller Lieber’s report, Increasing College Access Through School-Based Models of Postsecondary Preparation, Planning, and Support focuses on informing and helping educational leaders and policymakers with proven and effective ways of helping urban learners gain better access to higher education. On a large scale, we as a society create our own opportunities through specific and deliberate public action, which is based on public support. She also articulates the idea that children in urban communities face “roadblocks to college assess, especially for underrepresented students and first generation college goers, present ample evidence that current school-based models of postsecondary preparation, planning, and support provide inadequate and unequal services to their students."

Currently Project Coach is steadily identifying, recruiting and training potential leaders within the North End of Springfield. Our goal is to expose them to various learning opportunities formed by various lesson plans and lessons learned on the playing field. Project Coach is continually brainstorming ideas of how we can help our Blue Shirts attain their dreams of living fulfilling lives.

Similar to Lieber’s article, we are combining social and academic development by developing strategic relationships with teachers, deans, guidance counselors and administrators within various Springfield Public Schools. We have provided a free SAT preparation session for our coaches to help them achieve their goals of getting into college.

Project Coach is in the business of developing leaders through sports. It is our BELIEF you cannot be a true leader on the court or field if you are not taking the skill you learn as a coach and transfer those skill set to other areas of life.

PC From A Youth Perspective

2010-12-12T16:18:00.000-08:00

This past Monday evening, Project Coach leaders invited all high school coaches to talk about the program. The evening began with a focus group during which coaches discussed ways of improving the program, and the ways in which it has already begun to transform them.

Coach Tyesha shared that she feels her connection to Project Coach motivates her to do well in school, most recently in terms of raising her English grades. She noted that just as the Smith students motivate the high school coaches, the coaches in turn motivate the elementary-aged participants.

After the focus group, coaches began writing about their experiences in the program, following a list of prompts provided by program leaders. They built a narrative that they will use over video clips and images from Project Coach. It was obvious throughout the evening how much it meant to all coaches to be asked for their opinions. Not only did they share their ideas about the program's future, but they were asked to reflect upon what the program has done so far, both for them and the kids they coach. Most importantly, they had to think more about why they joined the program, and what it means to them.

As I went around from table to table, I heard coaches sharing memories of the past season's work with the elementary kids. Coach Zach shared that "his" 3rd graders liked football. Antonio laughed and said the kids call each other "Pokemons." Their thoughts were both warm and critical, noticing how much they care for the kids with whom they work, and what they can do to make the next season even more meaningful. At the last meeting of the season, coaches discussed the same question for a short time, and many noted that they wanted more time with the kids, even time talking or tutoring. It is hard to overstate the strength of the words of the high school coaches in these last conversations. Now we look ahead to what these statements will yield in the spring term.

Below is a brief "photo essay" of the evening:

The Effects of a College-Going Culture An Interview With Efrain Lopez

2010-12-09T19:58:00.000-08:00

Carol Miller Lieber’s Increasing College Access Through School-Based Models of Postsecondary Preparation, Planning and Support presents a series of organizing principles and promising practices that can propel today’s underrepresented youth to college and beyond. Lieber argues that a strong college-going culture can change the tides for any individual. To bring such a culture to life, a dedicated community must maximize the guidance they provide every student. This means both adults and teachers must listen responsively to youth, ask thoughtful questions, and provide helpful feedback. The community and it’s schools must engage in specific college-going activities, make post-secondary plans an exit requirement for every student, and above all else, believe in a genuine way that every person has the capacity to attend and flourish in college.

Over the past semester, I have seen many of Lieber’s proposed practices played out in the life of Project Coach and our high school coaches. Efrain Lopez, a second year PC coach and Senior at the Springfield Renaissance School, took time after school this week to answer a few of my questions about his path towards college.

Matt Samolewicz: What resources are available at your high school that have helped you to work towards a college education?

Efrain Lopez: I think my school, the Springfield Renaissance School, offers a lot of college-bound help. There is strong academic support, they provide extra help with schoolwork, and even help you to fill out your FAFSA. LGR, Lets Get Ready, a program that goes to a lot of Springfield high schools, also comes to our school and helps us to reach our college goals. Really, Renaissance is like LGR twenty-four-seven. Overall, Renaissance has helped me find colleges that are right for me.

MS: How have they helped you to find colleges that are right for you?

EL: Well, the school and my guidance counselors have helped me to think about my personality and where I might fit. They’ve also helped to point me in the right direction based on what majors I’m interested in. We started by making a list of about thirty colleges and then we narrowed it down to between seven and five colleges.

MS: What colleges are you applying to?

EL: Personally, I am applying to Southern Connecticut in New Haven, University of New Haven, University of Bridgeport, Springfield College, Springfield Technical Community College, and Holyoke Community College. My guidance counselors told me to apply to three kinds of colleges: reach schools, or schools to work forward to, comfort-zone schools, or schools you will most likely get in to, and safety schools, or schools that will definitely accept you.

MS: How has Project Coach helped you worked towards going to college?

EL: Project Coach and it's Thursday’s SAT preparation sessions have helped me to prepare for the SATs and do better in school. Overall, I have learned that I’ll do fine wherever I go to college. Based on my personality I think I will fit in wherever I go. Project Coach has helped me with that and can help a lot of kids who aren’t necessarily comfortable or have strong personalities.

MS: What resources aren’t available to you that you wish were?

EL: None, really. Ever since my Freshman year, Renaissance has been pushing college on me and my peers and it is up to us, the students, to take it seriously. Senior year comes for a lot of people and they go, ‘Oh man, if only I had listened to them!’ It is really a matter of learning to take it seriously. Not everyone in my community has access to the same resources. The resources are there, but you need to look for them. In my opinion, people help people who help themselves. You have to listen and take what is said seriously.

Efrain’s insight helped me to recognize what a college-going culture can do to assist our youth and their college goals. Efrain's experiences at the Springfield Renaissance School and as a member of Project Coach’s team are an account of the support it takes to make a post-secondary education a reality for today’s urban youth.

Kan-Jam Charlie!

2010-12-07T18:08:00.000-08:00

A year at Project Coach can pass you by in an instant. It hardly seems believable that it's more than 12 months since Don, Sam, and I took a trip over to Western New England College to meet with Professor Curt Hamakawa and his Sports Management and Business class on a sunny late fall day.

The visit proceeded much as we had expected; we presented Project Coach; people asked questions; some were interested; some weren't. What we hadn't bargained for was meeting two fascinating characters who would become ingrained in the PC mission for the next year.

Curt's story alone is worth a wealth of blog posts. A much traveled and highly regarded veteran of the US Olympic Committee, who had landed in Western Mass via a multitude of places to pursue his dream of working in higher education. A humble guy who's down-to-earth nature was immediately engaging and endearing. And someone who saw in Project Coach a program that spoke to his own outlook on life and connecting in a meaningful way to his academic pursuits. This chance meeting alone would have made the trip more than worthwhile.

And yet that wasn't all. At the end of the presentation, we passed around the contact sheet for follow up inquiries about the program. A healthy number of signatures, more questions, and some likely emails in the pipeline. And then there was Sophomore student Charles Drago. Who had questions. Lots of questions. Great questions. That guy at the front of the line who wanted to know more. Who seemed like he was REALLY interested. And so we eventually parted from an empty room, save for the three of us. And Charlie. Who still had more questions.

Fast forward all of 24 hours, and the three of us all have an email from this guy Charlie asking what he can do? When can he come down and visit the program? How can he help us? "He'll lose interest when finals hit", we thought. "He'll have had enough when he sees the 'organized chaos' we live in", we said. Not this guy. Not Charlie.

And so a year has passed. And countless PC visits, two big fundraisers organized, and $500+ later, Charlie has become an integral part of the Project Coach team. We've come to love the guy not just for the tremendous work he's done on behalf of Project Coach, but for his personal qualities too; the same humility that drew us to Curt in the first place, the ability to blend in and get to know our kids, and the initiative and motivation that's been such a wonderful asset to our program.

Nothing could have optimized Charlie's enthusiasm more than this past Friday, when along with his fellow WNEC students, he laid on an evening of high-octane fun at the 2nd Annual Kan-Jam fundraiser. In a night that pitted Smith ultimate frisbee players against WNEC's finest (with veteran disc-guru Sam Intrator also making a long awaited comeback), the real winners were Charlie and Project Coach. Or rather Project Coach and Charlie. That's the way he'd want it.

Increasing College Access: Next Steps

2010-12-05T19:19:00.000-08:00

With one semester of Project Coach under our belts as Red Shirts, it is time to begin thinking about second-semester pursuits. After reading Carol Miller Lieber’s report, Increasing College Access through School-Based Models of Postsecondary Preparation, Planning and Support, I am excitedly toying with a few ideas for how Project Coach can strengthen its college access support. At the beginning of next semester, I will write to update as to which mini-project I wish to pursue. Comments, suggestions, and initial pledges welcome!

1. Develop a scholarship fund for college-bound Blue-Shirt seniors. Lieber cites that Federal Pell grants are capped at $5,000 per student per year and colleges. Students must navigate a complicated system of scholarships and loans in order to make up the difference in tuition costs. First-generation college students need extra support in reaching their college goals, and oftentimes access to additional funds becomes a decisive factor for college enrollment. Project Coach could help alleviate financial obstacles by awarding scholarships for Blue Shirts who have met a set of criteria (participation, essay, involvement with community projects, etc.)

2. Make a postsecondary plan an exit requirement for every graduating Blue Shirt. Liber writes a postsecondary plan “is the most direct route to ensuring that all students have access to the services and support they need.” A postsecondary plan would require Blue Shirts to develop a portfolio throughout the year of college-application materials, including a set number of applications, a completed FAFSA, letters of recommendation, essay, and a back-up plan. Red-Shirts could help Blue Shirts set goals for each of these pieces and help connect the Blue Shirt with additional resources, such as appointments with admissions counselors.

3. Encourage participation in an experiential summer program. Summer programs can be especially powerful in opening the eyes of youth to experiences beyond their current point of reference. From travel-based to outdoor themed programs, youth are able to discover new passions, develop confidence and form friendships beyond their community. Additionally, Lieber writes that “research studies about first-generation college-goers indicate that the students who felt better prepared to take on the demands of college work and adjust to a different way of living were the same students who had more firsthand experiences on college campuses.” Through partnerships with specific programs/colleges, or through targeted fundraising, Project Coach could seek to place interested Blue Shirts in residential summer experiences.

4. Develop grade-specific college readiness curriculum. Project Coach currently assists juniors and seniors with college preparation through SAT tutoring, partnerships with Academic Coaches at partnering high schools, and informal Red Shirt guidance. However, Lieber suggests targeting all grades, 9-12, with specific and measurable college-prep benchmarks. For example, in Lieber’s sample curriculum, freshman students would visit their first college campus and draft an initial resume. Sophomores complete a job application, interview current college students, and begin job shadowing. This curriculum could tie directly to the postsecondary plan/portfolio.

SMART Goals

2010-12-05T13:53:00.000-08:00

This past Monday the youth coaches at Project Coach were asked to set SMART goals that needed to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely. Andy Wood, Project Coach director, opened the session by giving an example of the impact of goal setting within his own life. When he was studying at Durham he played on the university's rugby team. Two rugby enthusiasts who were unable to play due to injuries would make detailed spreadsheets of each player's performance after each game. The rugby players ignored the spreadsheets until a new coach came to the team, who asked each player to tell him what they had learned about their performance on the field from these spreadsheets. Based on this information each player made goals that aimed at improving their game. Andy realized that he needed to be making more tackles. He also became aware, by looking at the spreadsheets, that he made the majority of his tackles during the first half of each game. As a result he set SMART goals to become more fit and make more tackles during each game and the rugby team improved as each player strived to fulfill their goals.

After this introduction the youth coaches were given an exercise; each group had to set SMART goals that would hypothetically prepare them to run a marathon. Goals like "staying in shape" were deemed not specific enough, and met with the question: how will you stay in shape? Some youth coaches suggested keeping a food journal of having a coaching partner to help them stay in shape. Each youth coach was then asked to set their own SMART goals that they would be able to complete within a week so that during the next Project Coach session they would be able to reflect and discuss on whether they had achieved their individual short-term goals. One coach set the goal to finish all of his History work which he is behind in by completing a specific number of assignments a day and setting aside a specific time each night to complete the assignments.

The Whitsett Brothers and Project Coach

2010-12-01T11:18:00.000-08:00

The past few months have been an engrossing experience for our blue-shirt coaches. This has been exemplified by the Whitsett brothers. Recently I had a discussion with with Bryant and Devin Whitsett, two brothers, who have joined this program and have done an extraordinary job. They both made it clear that their personal relationships with their elementary students was not only instrumental in making themselves better coaches, but that it also made the program far more personally rewarding to them for their own individual growth. Don't take my word for it though, this is what they had to say in their own words:

One of the many things that I find great about the program is that you get to develop a relationship with the kids. The kids come to the program excited and ready to play and that’s great because it becomes more of a friendly atmosphere as opposed to a subordinate atmosphere. Yes, you are the coach instructing them how to play sports but kids do not respond well to a strict and monotonous tone so it is our job to explain to the kids the rules of the games in a fun way. And it’s hard not to develop a relationship with the kids even if you tried.

Ariana and Alondra are 5^th grade girls in the program that get along so well together and they make me laugh all the time. They pick up the games quickly and I think they both are great athletes. They do little things like stick their tongue out at me and things like that while smiling and I do it back because we enjoy each other’s company. We call ourselves the Red Warriors along with two other animated boys named Gabriel and Joshua along with my enthusiastic partner Coach Christina who also works well with the kids. That is the greatest thing about Project Coach.

Go Red Warriors!!!

Coach Devin Whitsett

What I like about Project Coach is that the high school coaches are able to form relationships with the kids. In the beginning, I thought that the kids were going to come here and think about nothing but them and playing. I noticed that most of the kids were watching the blue shirts and how we were doing things and for me it turned out to be beneficial because I watch my behavior and what comes out my mouth because I don’t want to be a bad influence on them; and my interaction with the kids in games also contributes to our relationships. I remember a time where my partner, Coach Millie, and I were showing the kids how to pass and spread out when working as a team and also how to communicate. When Coach Millie and I were done, they copied exactly what we did and also did a good job in communicating and we both were very impressed.

What I also like about project coach is that the adult coaches try to think of different games and activities so that the kids wont be bored and I am glad to be apart of that and contribute my ideas because all of our efforts pay off at the end whenever we see the kids. The red shirts could be the type that doesn’t care about the kids and make them play the same games repeatedly but the red shirts keep them entertained as much as they can and for the most part, it works. That has become something I have noticed and appreciated about Project Coach.

Coach Bryant Whitsett

A Reflective Community

2010-11-30T20:35:00.001-08:00

A few weekends ago two Project Coach coaches, Kiana Figueroa and Zachery Johnson, took time out of their Saturday to join me at Smith College’s Museum of Art. With the help of Smith Volunteers, the three of us set-up a drawing project for families visiting the Museum on Family Day. As kids and their parents or teachers began to pour into our room, Zach and Kiana met everyone with a smile and choices: the kids could trace their shadows onto the paper, draw the projected artwork, or combine the image and ever-changing shadow. Zach and Kiana observantly assisted newcomers, helped those who were struggling, and rolled finished work for families on their way to the next Museum project. I couldn’t help but notice both coaches working beautifully with the variety and amount of kids and adults streaming through the project.

The next Thursday Project Coach session, I was scrambling to break down just how we could reflect on our teaching experience in a meaningful way. I proposed a written reflection, but Kiana had a different idea. “What if we paint a reflection? We could paint one half of a sheet of paper, fold it, and have a reflection on the other side.” Kiana was proposing a visual reflection. Not only did it fit wonderfully, but it was much more interesting than paragraphs and it gave us the opportunity to spend time together in a relaxed but productive way.

I realized that to reflect on an experience didn’t require a certain formality or structure. Both coaches wanted to reflect in conversation and through the making process.They wanted to engage in a discussion of what we experience in and out of Project Coach, and I was there to listen and contribute my own story.

Between Family day and our Thursday reflection, I learned quite a bit from Zach and Kiana. We shared the qualities of our many communities: our families, our schools, our neighborhoods, our friends. We considered the differences and similarities between our communities, and the effect they have not only us, but every individual. The experience guided us into a natural reflection on what it means to be a member of and contribute to any community.

Framingham resident helps inner city youths - Framingham, MA - The MetroWest Daily News

2010-11-30T11:58:00.000-08:00

Framingham resident helps inner city youths - Framingham, MA - The MetroWest Daily News

DAP, YES and Dodgeball

2010-11-24T18:28:00.000-08:00

In September Project Coach youth coaches took the DAP; they are now taking the DAP again in November and will take it for a third time in May. The coaches answer questions, which include “Stand up for what I believe in” and “Do my homework” by choosing one of the four boxes under: “not at all, rarely”, “somewhat, sometimes”, “very, often”, and “extremely, almost always”.

The coaches’ answers in September serve as a baseline, which is then compared to the coaches’ answers to the same assessment taken in November and May as well as the answers of coaches in other programs. The importance of thinking about and giving honest answers to the questions posed was emphasized before the coaches started the assessment. The answers to the DAP serve as a snap shot of where the coaches were before starting the program and where they are after participating in the program for nearly three months, hopefully showing an enduring progress in terms of the coaches' personal development. The questions however are very open to interpretation and the changed answers can be attributed to a variety of factors within the coaches’ lives.

On the same Monday afternoon the youth coaches also took the Youth Experience Survey (YES). The YES is more of a reflection of the program as a whole and what the youth coaches experiences have been so far as part of Project Coach. The coaches are asked to not only take into account the coaching of elementary school students, which is a piece of the program, but to assess the program as a whole including the SAT preparation and the sessions on Mondays with the Project Coach directors and fellows. Both assessments are an attempt to gauge the progress and evolution both within the youth coaches themselves and within the program. The surveys attempt to quantify and measure the impact of the program.

After completing the DAP and the YES, during the second half of the session, the Red Shirts, Blue Shirts and Project Coach directors all played three intense rounds of dodgeball in the gym. Two youth coaches took on organizational leadership roles making sure the rules of the game were followed with hollers like “stay behind the free throw line!”

What are you thankful for this year?

2010-11-24T04:56:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving!

Paris - The Final Stop

2010-11-23T14:10:00.000-08:00

Andy Wood - Project Coach Program Director

PARIS, 11/22/10

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and this is the case today as we prepare to fly from Paris Charles de Gaulle back to the equally wet and windy and windy climes of Boston.

After a weekend savoring the sights of the City of Love - the Montmartre, the Champs-Elysees, and the fabulous history of the Chateau de Versailles, our final meeting with Fabienne Molle from the US Embassy in Paris produced some great discussion about not only the Marseille exchange, but also the future potential for further sports-leadership based programs in the future. This capped a thoroughly enjoyable and extremely productive week of experiences, in which I learned as much about the French approach to developing sport among youth as my amiable hosts did about Project Coach, and the collaborative initiative with ITD. My sincere thanks go to Julie Hooks-Davis for all of her hard work in planning and preparing such an extensive agenda, and our liaisons in Marseille for their enthusiasm, hospitality, and unwavering energy.

Au revoir!

Williston High School Volleyball Team Comes to Project Coach

2010-11-20T12:25:00.000-08:00

Amidst some initial confusion, the Project Coach youth coaches were shown a short video of a game the girl’s volleyball team from Williston High School in Easthampton. Both the Williston players and the youth coaches then headed towards the gym where the Williston players brought the youth coaches into three rotating groups and taught them how different components of the volleyball game such as bumping and setting. The captain of the volleyball team explained that “a big part of volleyball is cheering”. The excitement and energy was palpable as each group of high school students screamed out the number of passes they had made without dropping the ball, each group competing against each other. “I’ve got it”, they would tell their fellow teammates, communicating with each other in an effort to keep the ball in the air. Once everyone was back in the Chestnut Library the youth coaches and Williston students paired up. For the first three minutes the Project Coach youth coaches explained what they do at Project Coach every week.

Youth coaches answered:

“We are role models to little kids.”

“We coach the kids, which is hard but fun.”

“The kids are rambunctious.”

“One Thursdays some of us have SAT prep.”

The Williston students then spoke of their average day:

“It’s a boarding school so I live in a dorm.”

“We have six classes a day and one free period.”

“School ends at two but sports go on until five thirty.”

“From eight pm to ten pm we have study hall in our rooms. It sounds horrendous but I get my work done”

“The main difference between private and public school is the workload. When I came to Williston from a public school it hit me real hard. My grades weren’t too hot.”

“Students come from all around the US. That girl sitting over there is from Chicago”

“We go to school every other Saturday from eight thirty am to eleven thirty am."

When Sam Intrator asked the group of coaches and Williston students to raise their hand if they were fluent in two or more languages, four Williston students raised their hands while more than seven Project Coach coaches’ hands were raised.

"c'est Marseille!"-- Director Andy Wood in France Part 2

2010-11-18T14:33:00.000-08:00

By Andy J. Wood, Project Coach Director

PC Director with the French Commission

Hoops by the sea in Marseille

MARSEILLE, FRANCE: "c'est Marseille!"

It's a phrase I've heard over and over again since my arrival. At first, it seemed little more than someone pointing out the obvious; yes -- of course we're in Marseille...I've at least figured that part out by now. But in the past couple of days, I've started to understand its real significance. In essence, it's the stock response for anything relating to the unique quirkiness that exists in Marseilles;

"why do people park their cars on traffic islands and in front of the doors to stores so you literally can't get in?". 'C'est Marseille'

"why do people drive their motorcycles down the sidewalk in the pedestrian district at 50 miles per hour?" 'C'est Marseille'

"why do the glass shower doors only cover a quarter of the bath length, thus flooding the entire room every time you use it?" 'C'est Marseille'

It's partly what could make living here incredibly infuriating to an outsider, I'd assume, but more importantly it encapsulates what makes this city so purely unique, and unsurpassable for its flair. It also means that you're likely to meet some incredibly warm and gentile people, as has been the case so far during my stay. How does this relate to PC? In short, these new-found friends encapsulate many of the very same traits that we hold in high esteem within our program: versatility, passion, determination, vibrance, and -moreover - a clear 'joie de vivre'.

Thanks to the continued generosity and cooperation of our amiable French hosts, my time over the past two days has been evenly spent between meeting the Presidents of eight basketball clubs from which the youth for the exchange program will be selected - along with their coaches - and running PC clinics for such teens, and feasting at a variety of excellent eating establishments, courtesy of our colleagues at the American Consulate and the Marseille Sports Bureau. Indeed, we had the pleasure of meeting with all of these entities at a group-wide meeting earlier today at the soccer complex of Olympique Marseille, where I was able to share some video and slides depicting PC to a very eager and impressed audience.

Soon we will embark upon visits to the final two clubs on our tour schedule. The structure of organized sport in Marseille - and in France in general - is vastly different from that of the US, and arguably more impressive. Over 1500 sports clubs across many disciplines and ages exist in this very city alone, supported by some private sector contributions, but in large part from public source funding. As a result, an intricate network of gyms, pools, fields, and stadia criss-cross this diverse city, stretching from the beautiful coastal areas to the rugged limestone hills that encompass the region to the north. Control of this sizeable organization lies ultimately within the mayor's office, for whom our superb host Monsieur Francois Noel works. To give some sense of scope, the city boasts 46 full size gyms, 17 swimming pools, and a logistical planning staff of over 230. Put simply, they take this stuff seriously.

Project Coach Gets a Volleyball Lesson

2010-11-18T08:50:00.000-08:00

This past Monday night the volleyball team from the Williston Northampton School visited PC's Coaching Academy. They started by showing a video of a recent game so that PC coaches could get a sense of how the game is structured.

They then moved to the gym for a clinic on how to play, focusing on two foundational moves: bumping and setting. After the clinic, both groups were able to talk with one another about PC in Springfield and boarding school in Easthampton.

As a PC Fellow stated at a recent meeting, the evening was a rare opportunity for students to meet with a group who has a very different daily experience. Williston and PC plan to continue working together in the future, and volleyball is now a likely candidate for future seasons of PC.

Springfield's "Director of Wellness"

2010-11-18T08:33:00.000-08:00

Coleen Walsh, Director of Physical Education, Health and Family and Consumer Sciences for Springfield Public Schools, says that the job could better be described as "Director of Wellness." Walsh's job takes her to 46 different buildings and ranges from dietary sciences to child development, from physical education to health instruction, and more. She supervises teachers, writes curriculum, and works with the community. She is a member of the Mayor's committee on teen pregnancy. What is more, Walsh is always aware of the general needs of the district, as the academic progress and physical health of students are inextricable.

Her current project focuses on getting students to be more physically active throughout the school day. She is piloting a national program called Playworks, which began in 1996 in California, and currently holds a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to expand to 650 additional schools and 27 cities by 2012. It aims to use recess as a productive time to help kids become more physically healthy and to encourage positive interactions rather than the all-too-frequent conflicts that break out during this open time.

Springfield Public Schools will pilot the program for one week, targeting Level 4 schools as the first potential sites for Playworks. Walsh emphasizes the need for such a program because of the limited time students have for both recess and Physical Education (PE). They are allotted 15 minutes per day for recess, and approximately 45 minutes per week for PE. In larger schools, students must rotate in order to attend gym class. In most cases, one teacher provides both PE and Health classes for the entire school. With a program like Playworks, however, students would receive the structured physical activity of gym class every day at recess, and sometimes during class as well.

Walsh began her own career as a physical education teacher, and then moved on to become a Health Resource teacher, traveling to all Springfield schools. She then moved on to supervise Health Education and Family Consumer Sciences, also serving as a liaison with nursing services of the Public Health Department.

Over the past 36 years, Walsh has become intimately aware of the challenges facing not only students but health and PE teachers as well. She believes deeply in the need for a well-rounded curriculum that involves Health, PE, Art, and Music instruction. She also knows that teachers have a mere 200 minutes each week for these subjects, and foreign languages, combined.

Most discussions around the state of education in the US focus on reading and math scores, and, Walsh points out, test scores prevail in the discussion of reform. However, she says, "The message is starting to come around." Research supports the belief that students who eat well and exercise regularly are much more focused during instructional time for core subjects. Playworks is a leading program in this body of research, featured in 2007 by the Harvard Family Research Project. (For more information on Playworks, see http://www.playworks.org/.)

Another program integrating academic goals with athletics is Project Coach, for which Walsh has recommended a number of PE teachers (including her own son, who is the new Track Instructor for the program). Walsh hopes to help PC provide course credit to High School coaches, an effort that is in its early stages of development. "Project Coach helps to show kids a future," she says.

Project Coach Goes Global: Andy Wood in France

2010-11-16T17:59:00.000-08:00

By Andy J. Wood, Project Coach Director

Sports do not build character. They reveal it.

Heywood Broun, US journalist (1888 - 1939)

MARSEILLES, FRANCE: The brisk sea breeze, a pleasant 55 degree temperature, and faint sounds of the familiar early morning routine - all while the Eagles and Redskins battled it out live on Monday Night Football with painful French dubbed announcing - were all stark reminders that this certainly wasn't Western Massachusetts anymore. Indeed, while the Project Coach fellows and youth coaches were about to hit the hay after another Monday night academy session, the program was just waking to a whole new audience 3500 miles west, in Marseille, France.

PC Director Andy Wood in Marseilles, France.

As a part of the Institute of Training and Development's partnership with the State Department, I'm currently attending a series of meeting and workshops in France's southernmost city to help develop an exchange program between French and American youth over the next 18 months. Our series of appointments began early this morning, with an opening breakfast hosted by the interim Counsel General at the American Consulate in Marseille - Philip Richards - who expressed his gratitude and delight that youth from his region had been selected to take part in the program. Accompanied by the wonderful Madame Josette Steinbach - a former high school teacher from Strasbourg fluent in four languages, who has spent over twenty years in the Public Affairs departments of various US Consulates - we were able to establish the criteria for selecting the ten prospective youth coaches from the city, as well as devise an appropriate application and interview procedure for evaluating the candidates.

Shortly following this meeting, I attended a planning session with Francois Noel - the Head of Sports Facilities and Planning in Marseilles (no small feat in the second largest city in France) - Madame Steinbach, and Mrs Julie Hooks-Davis of the organizing agency, ITD. In addition to exchanging ideas (where possible in our foreign tongue, although the astute translator Ned was on hand when this wasn't possible), all members of the planning committee placed utmost importance in selecting youth of excellent moral character and leadership potential, over sporting ability or competitive prowess. Mr Noel - a former professional judo champion himself - espoused the very same values of PC in this respect, and it became quickly apparent that the goals of the Marseille Sports Bureau aligned very neatly with those of PC and ITD.

The remainder if the late afternoon and evening was devoted to meeting with prospective youth at two of the ten potential sports clubs shortlisted from the 150+ in Marseille, informing them if the program and fielding their questions. In the spirit of PC, we even managed a couple of games of 'freeze tag' and 'sharks and minnows', the latter of which was played with particular gusto and energy by a group of French u16 national players at the first club we attended!

Tomorrow promises to be equally fruitful, when we will meet with members of the mayors office, attend a luncheon hosted by the consulate, and visit 4 more sports clubs in the city for potential applicants.

Andy Wood - 11/16/10.

Project Coach Counts--A Veteran Coach Perspective

2010-11-16T14:42:00.000-08:00

by Anna Bartolini

“Volleyball is not really my cup of tea, so I would be glad to do an interview,” responded Coach Ty after I asked her if she would mind stepping out of Monday night’s session on volleyball for a few minutes to talk to me. Coach Ty is one of our most veteran coaches—she joined the team in eighth grade and is now a junior. Her four years with Project Coach give Coach Ty an invaluable perspective on the successes and challenges the program has faced.

Milbrey W. McLaughlin in his report, “Community Counts: How Youth Organizations Matter for Youth Development,” advocates for community based organizations (CBO’s) to do more listening to youth. McLaughlin writes, “A lack of youth perspective leads adults to make wrong assumptions.” In an effort to better understand the motives and experiences of the Project Coach youth, I turned to Coach Ty.

AB: Coach Ty, I read this article called “Community Counts.” It interviewed a bunch of youth about the CBO’s they are involved with in order to determine what makes a “good” organization for youth. What do you think is good about Project Coach?

CT: One thing that I think is good is that Project coach has expanded slowly over time. The first year we started out pretty small, but each year we get more kids. The kids like coming. It’s good for them because it teaches them how to interact with other people.

I can also see how Project Coach brings out a person. I remember being new and quiet—I was still learning. I wasn’t loud like I am now! And I can see that with the new coaches—quiet and shy—but give them a few years and we’ll see.

AB: Having a “clear focus” is considered to be another quality of a good program. What do you think, does Project Coach have a clear focus?

CT: Yeah, leadership. See the college coaches [red shirts] mentor the Blue Shirts [high school coaches]. Then the Blue Shirts mentor the little kids. And I guess its all centered around sports like soccer and basketball.

AB: Can you tell me more about being a mentor to the kids?

CT: I think we are a good influence on these kids, like they could follow in our footsteps. They see how we are as people, and they can want to be like that, too. And it’s a lot of fun working with the kids. I remember one time I twisted my ankle getting ready for the kids to come and so I had to go home. I felt so bad for missing a practice, and the kids were all yelling “No, Coach Ty, where are you going?” You start to feel responsible for the kids, so you hate when you can’t be there.

AB: I have seen how much the kids love you and how well you work with the kids. A good CBO should help its youth think towards the future. Have you thought at all about what your future looks like and if it might involve working with you?

CT: Well, all my teachers always tell me I should be a teacher. But I love sports and coaching, so that’s my version of teaching. Being in Project Coach also really makes me want to go to college and then start my own organization to work with kids. I can see me doing this—coaching basketball especially. I always loved sports but now I see more options for working with sports and kids.

AB: If you could help make Project Coach a better organization, what would you change?

CT: We should expand Project Coach to more schools in Springfield. There are a lot of other schools that could also use us as role models. I would also make each session longer. Everyday it seems like we are having so much fun and then it’s already time to go home!

As Coach Ty’s Red Shirt, I can attest to how much fun she has with her kids each session. I can also attest to how valuable I have found Coach Ty’s expertise this semester. Not only is she well versed in all the Project Coach routines and games, she is a skilled and refined leader. At one of the very first sessions, Coach Ty set the scene for the season to come as she laid down the rules, “I only have two rules. The first is to be respectful. That means to listen and to play fairly. The second rule is really important: Have fun!”

Former Youth Coach Cassandra comes to Smith College

2010-11-14T12:48:00.000-08:00

EDITOR'S NOTE: People often ask, do you track how PC youth do after they leave the program? It's a very legitimate and important question that seeks to understand program impact. Some times impact unfolds across time-- even years. Here is a short piece about how a mentoring relationship between a college student and a PC teen plays out across multiple years.

Cassandra Gonzalez, a senior at Renaissance High School in Springfield, and her friend arrived at Smith College at ten on Friday morning where they met with Jewels Rhode, a senior at Smith College. Cassandra, who is thinking of studying either Psychology or Nursing, was visiting the college as a prospective student.

In the morning she sat in on one of Jewels’ Statistics classes. Cassandra found the class “confusing”; when asked about the lunch she had had at one of Smith’s dining rooms she commented that the “french fries were good”. Cassandra and Jewels met through Project Coach. Cassandra was a youth coach and Jewels was participating in the program because she was taking Sam Intrator’s class “Education in the City” at the time. Cassandra and Jewels would speak on Thursday afternoons, which is how Cassandra first came to consider Smith as a college option.

Cassandra heard of Project Coach through her younger sister who attended Chestnut Middle School in Springfield. Cassandra really enjoyed participating in Project Coach because she “loves little kids”. She admitted to having one player who was secretly her favorite, a girl with “Shirley Temple curls.” The boys on the team she coached could get “fresh” but were also “cute”. Out of the sports she had to coach, Cassandra enjoyed soccer most because “the Red Shirts aren’t as close to you” since soccer is played on the fields outdoors and “you have more control” as a Blue Shirt over your team. In the spring basketball became harder, but Cassandra thought that it became more difficult because she had more to do: softball practice, an internship and SAT preparation classes. She didn’t participate in Project Coach this year because she didn’t feel she could give her “110 percent commitment”.

Learning Healthy Habits While Playing Tag: Meet Coach Dave

2010-11-12T17:14:00.000-08:00

"I feel like I haven't worked in months," says Dave Walsh, the new track instructor for Project Coach. "It's too fun - it doesn't feel like a job." This is Dave's first time working with kids, but running and coaching, run in the family. Dave runs at least 35 miles a week, which is about the same number of years his father has coached high school Cross Country.

Dave studied finance at Lasell College, where he also ran on the Cross Country team. So far, he has used his finance studies as the Annual Fund Director at his Alma Mater, Cathedral High School. Project Coach was an unexpected addition to his year, a position he found out about from his mother, who is the Director of Physical Education, Health and Family Consumer Sciences for Springfield Public Schools.

Dave writes track lessons aimed at helping kids have fun while learning about health and exercise at the same time. One of his major teaching points is on hydration, and the importance of drinking water rather than Gatorade and other sugary drinks.

As the teams rotate and join Dave for a brief session, he gives them high-fives and introduces the relays of the day, which he also designs himself. During the week of Halloween, participants did Zombie, Witch, and Werewolf relays.Dave is learning about how to plan each day, which can prove challenging. "You never know what they'll like," he says. However, a visit to one of Dave's sessions, and a talk with the High School coaches will both reveal that the kids are loving track. Coach Elyahsa says the kids like the competition, and that they look forward to the relays, which are a rare activity amidst the regular soccer schedule. Coach Lakeisha sees a simple joy the kids take in the session: "They like chasing each other."

Program Director Andy Wood says track is one of the many sports Project Coach may include in the future. Because Project Coach Fellows have experience playing a variety of sports, upcoming seasons may bring even more options for elementary-aged participants.

Dave thrives on seeing the kids have fun at Project Coach practices. He throws himself into the games as much as possible, letting the kids tag and chase him as well. Dave hopes to spread the notion that through running, one can actually gain energy and feel better.

Track is not the only contribution Dave brings to the program. With each Coaching Academy session, he is taking more leadership and learning more about the High School coaches. He says, "Project Coach is a chance for students to learn how to be responsible and be good role models. The leadership and communication skills learned at Project Coach transfer into all aspects of life, and I feel these students are improving not just as coaches but as people."

Community Counts and Project Coach

2010-11-10T06:12:00.000-08:00

By Marquis Taylor, Project Coach Fellow, 2010

Can we develop a community within Project Coach that develops an expectation of achievements and triumphs that make a difference in a formal and informal way both socially and academically.

During our fall semester, we have encountered many challenges that have allowed our Red Shirts and High School coaches to be reflective, responsible, and reliable. We are able to do this by building social capital by employing teachers and administers who are currently working with the school setting to assist the Red Shirts to stay on top of the high school students academics. We are also focused on their coaching ability/skill sets. My main focus is how we can teach our coaches to motivate youth and be dependable role models.

Milbrey W. McLaughlin discusses how youth organizations matter for Youth Development in the article Community Counts. McLaughlin stated, “Community organization can make a powerful, positive difference in youth’s lives.” Community Based Organizations have a unique ability to engage hard to reach youth that feel isolated from the community.

Based on my reading of the article, I am challenging myself and Project Coach to develop standards that will help our high school coaches form their own expectations of achievement and triumphs.

During our fall semester, our team has encountered many challenges that have allowed our Red Shirts and High School coaches to be reflective, responsible, and reliable. We are able to do this by building social capital within the schools. Project Coach is employing teachers and administers who are currently working in the school setting to assist the Red Shirts to stay on top of the high school students academics while also focusing on their coaching ability/skill sets. My main focus is how we can teach our coaches to motivate youth and be dependable role models both by not just talking the talk but walking the walk.

As a result, I can refer back to this while talking to the high school students about finding ways to self-motivate themselves to complete school assignments and community based projects they believe to be pointless or boring. As coaches, the kids are forced to tackle challenges that develop leadership and social skills needed in their community. As high school coaches, the kids are developing a sense of personal worth, and forming ideas of what they may be interested in the future.

Many of the high school coaches have the potential to be 1st generation high school graduates and/or college bound. The impact the coaches are having on the community is magnified 10 fold because they are beginning to break a cycle of mental poverty that leads to economic poverty.

Art Project led by graduate student Matt Samolewicz

2010-11-06T11:55:00.000-07:00

Throughout the week, Project Coach directors and graduate students meet with the youth coaches after school, mentoring them. On one such afternoon Matt lead a watercolour art project. Each youth coach selected a photograph taken during a Project Coach session. They then transferred the picture onto a sheet of watercolour paper. After reflecting on what the photograph meant to them, the coaches picked a sentence that they felt described the photograph they had chosen. Devin picked an image of his fellow youth coach, Frankie, kicking a soccer ball because, he honestly explained, it was the “easiest to trace”. He picked the sentence “practice makes perfect” to accompany the image. He isn’t altogether pleased with the way his watercolour turned out because he “didn’t use enough water” and it “looked like paint” rather than watercolour. Kiana chose a photograph of many hands, one on top of the other. She selected the sentence “working together is the key to success”. When the players she coaches work together as a team they play better games, she explained. To express more she used “different kinds of colours to make the picture bolder”. A couple of weeks after she

completed the project Kiana brought in some of her own pencil drawing, saved in a plastic folder for Matt to see. One of the drawings she brought was an image of her sneaker. She explained that she had observed her sneaker while she drew it to make the drawing more realistic; another detailed drawing depicted an erupting volcano. Matt commented that saving her drawings in a plastic folder indicated how much Kiana cared about them.

Looking Through the PC lens...

2010-11-06T06:34:00.000-07:00

By Courtney Centeno, PC Graduate Fellow 2010

Everyone knows what it feels like to step in his or her own shoes, but what does it feel like to wear someone else’s? Better yet, how do you explain to another person what you see through your own eyes? One of the many goals of Project Coach is to relay to our high school students the idea that understanding and seeing different perspectives leads to more possibilities. Role-playing and role-reversals were recurrent themes during our training sessions in the beginning of the year, and we used these devices often to help both redshirts and blueshirts become better coaches. Articulating your own point of view is a step towards becoming a good coach. Recognizing various points of views is a step towards becoming an outstanding coach and team player, on and off the field.

To me, there is no better way to grasp the idea of perspective than from behind a camera lens. Camera angle, lighting, framing, perspective, and composition are all critical components to not only understanding how you look at things, but also why. For the remainder of our Thursday sessions, I will be working closely with Christina Gomez and Millie Alicea-Cruz on a photography project where they will express their points of view through a sequence of photographs. The components of photography are the preliminary concepts of understanding perspective, and this project thus far has been a great opportunity for Christina and Millie to decide which parts of their world they want to put in a frame.

The Balancing Act

2010-11-03T19:00:00.000-07:00

Autumn Impression by Vassily Kandinsky
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts

By Matthew Samolewicz, PC Graduate Fellow 2010

Dr. Beth Miller, in her Critical Hours: Afterschool Programs and Educational Success, argues that the standardized testing culture of today’s schools has resulted in less time and fewer resources devoted to critical skills our students need to successfully navigate life after school. Soft skills, such as teamwork, problem-solving, and communication, are often overlooked as our schools race to meet overarching standards. If our system is not cultivating these hard-to-measure soft skills in today’s youth, in Miller’s words, what can we do to "right the imbalance," of our preoccupied institutions?

Project Coach's dedicated team is making every attempt to equalize the playing field for the students we have come to know in the past two months. Every week, our Springfield coaches take on leadership roles that enable them to exercise the essential soft skills mentioned above. Outside of their coaching responsibilities, PC organizes afterschool programs our coaches are required to participate in, including SAT preparation, tutoring and individualized projects led by Project Coach’s Red Shirts.

This past Thursday night, I had the opportunity to share an hour and a half with two of our high school coaches. Zachery Johnson and Kiana Figueroa, both eighth grade students, will be facilitating their own drawing project for Smith College’s Museum of Art this Saturday, November sixth. The event welcomes families to enjoy the Museum's incredible collection free of charge and offers a variety of art-based projects to youth visiting the museum. In preparation for Family Day, Kiana, Zach and I, with the help of the Museum’s Julie Zappia, spent Thursday's PC session projecting paintings from the Museum’s collection onto Chestnut Middle School’s library walls. We looked closely at the work of Paul Cezanne, Vanessa Bell, Vassily Kandinsky and Fernand Leger. The coaches shared their visions with Julie and I. They imagined machines, figures and landscapes in the works. Zach and Kiana considered what it might mean to leave parts of a painting unpainted and reacted to the color, compositions, and feelings that confronted them. They observed as a team, often playing off of each others interpretations. They approached painting as a sort of puzzle that, with time and a little bit of oneself, can be unlocked. Kiana and Zach communicated the visual stories and understandings they saw without missing a beat.

There is no doubt in my mind that every youth has the capacity, vision, and imagination to be great learners and leaders. Zach, Kiana, and our other Blue Shirt Coaches have proven this time and time again. Project Coach, with it's comprehensive range of strategies and services, works to propel our coaches to a place where they can share the greatness we see each week.

Critical Hours and Project Coach

2010-11-02T05:22:00.000-07:00

By Anna Bartolini, PC Graduate Fellow 2010

Through multiple levels of adult mentoring in its programming, Project Coach intentionally and explicitly attempts to build strong youth-adult relationships. The Critical Hours Executive Summary, which synthesizes research on the benefits of afterschool programs, points to positive relationships with adults as one key area for promoting educational equity. Interaction with adults outside of the home setting can expose youth to a variety experiences that “broaden their horizons” and “build on their interests and skills.” Research suggests that consistent participation in high quality afterschool programs that emphasize these youth-adult connections can help ameliorate some of the “circumstances linked to poor achievement, e.g., low expectations by teachers, students’ alienation from school, lack of enrichment activities, and poor quality education.”

The Project Coach model places youth-adult relationships at the core of its work by providing multiple ways for youth to engage with various adults. Most notably, each high school coach, or Blue Shirt, is paired with a college coach, or Red Shirt. This relationship is fostered throughout the entire year through explicit modeling or instructing of coaching technique and through a variety of more informal opportunities. Coaches work together to prepare for each session with the elementary kids, socialize and get to know each other during Monday and Thursday sessions, and work on long-term goals such as improved grades at school or completing homework assignments on time. The Red Shirt essentially takes on the role of the mentor, guiding or coaching the Blue Shirt through the full Project Coach experience.

Blue Shirts also have the opportunity to engage with a variety of other adults. Each Blue Shirt has an academic coach, a teacher or administrator who helps the student stay focused and on task at school through frequent check-ins with both students and teachers. The academic coach is essential for helping to forge the after school-school link by ensure consistency between Project Coach goals and school goals.

Junior and Senior Blue Shirts also participate in Let's Get Ready, a no-cost SAT prep program. The coordinator for this program, Marie Wallace, serves as another adult role-model and mentor for the Blue Shirts. Many of the Blue Shirts will work extensively one-on-one with Marie in order to navigate the college application process.

As a team, the various adult coaches and the Project Coach administration work to provide Blue Shirts with multiple opportunities for positive adult-relationships through informal interactions, direct academic assistance, and a broad variety of enriching experiences. For example, this month, Blue Shirts will attend a college basketball game (including a session with the head coach), participate in a screening and discussion of the documentary Waiting for Superman, and visit a local college campus. These types of experiences will continue throughout the year, both in efforts to help provide opportunities for educational equity, and to form genuine long-lasting youth-adult relationships.

Meet the PC Team - Marquis Taylor

2010-11-01T09:20:00.000-07:00

My name is Marquis Taylor, and I'm a graduate teaching candidate at Smith College and a Project Coach Fellow. My long term goal is to lead a youth based non profit that focuses on building leaders by reconnecting youth to learning.

My interest stems from my own youth. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA and I had the privilege of using basketball as my vehicle to broaden my horizons.

Currently, my goal is to begin a program in Brockton, MA for the summer of 2011. I am learning how vital networking and building relationships are especially in the non profit world. Between traveling to meetings, school, coaching, and Project Coach, I have been able to develop great relationships that have allowed me to meet some influential people from Stephen A. Smith (ESPN analyst), Jim Calhoun (UConn Head Basketball Coach), Tim Moore (Quinnipiac University Head Basketball Coach), and Ed Cooley (Fairfield University Head Basketball Coach).

As a result of these meetings, Fairfield University Men's Basketball Coaches and Project Coach will be setting up a time for our high school coaches to see a high level Division 1 basketball game, and meet with coaches and players, on November 8th (see our blog for a write up soon after!).

Ed Cooley, who is also a Stonehill College graduate, is a dynamic and energetic coach who will truly leave a lasting impression on our high school coaches. I am excited to be apart of the process and look forward to giving our high school coaches a new experience.

http://www.fairfieldstags.com/coaches.aspx?rc=22&path=mbball

Student-Teaching and Project Coach: A Parallel Process

2010-10-31T18:29:00.000-07:00

Upon first consideration, it might be difficult to see connections between The Smith College Campus School, a day school in Northampton, and Project Coach, an after-school program in Springfield. However, PC Fellows like Anna Bartolini and Kathleen Boucher live this connection every week.

Bartolini, who is a student-teacher in a first grade classroom at the Campus School, says she is picking up on strategies to use with the elementary participants at Project Coach sessions. Going from the highly structured school day to the after-school atmosphere can be challenging, says Bartolini. At the same time, she is gaining useful experience with solving problems spontaneously, figuring out new ways to motivate and engage young people.

Bartolini also thinks of student-teaching and PC as parallel experiences. As a student-teacher, she plays a role quite similar to the High School coaches with PC. She notices strategies her lead teacher uses to encourage her as a new teacher, like accentuating the positive. Bartolini says that this serves as a reminder to always compliment the HS coaches, giving them encouragement along with increased responsibility.

Bartolini (left in photo) is not only learning from her lead teacher at the Campus School, however, as some HS coaches have more experience with Project Coach, and with working with young kids. Bartolini learns strategies from returning coaches, and with all of the coaches with whom she works, she is constantly learning how to become a better mentor by strengthening relationships. Part of this work involves learning about the goals of the coaches (Barbara (right in photo), Ty, and Elyahsa), both immediate and long term (like which college to attend).

In her first grade classroom, Bartolini gets to know her students in very different ways, through reading and recess both. As she gets to know her students, she sees what reading strategies work best. She says that the first graders were really comfortable with her at the very beginning of the year. While first graders are eager to "hold your hand at recess," Bartolini says, high school students can sometimes hold back until they feel they know who you are.

According to PC Fellow Kathleen Boucher, student-teacher in a fourth grade classroom at the Campus School, she feels like she transitions into a head teacher with Project Coach. While she looks for advice from her head teacher at her teaching placement, her high school coaches look to her for help with the elementary participants after school. At times, Boucher notes, she jumps in and becomes the leader of both groups. According to her, it is a sometimes a challenge to bring the structure of the classroom to the athletic field. One management technique she brings from student-teaching is for giving directions, whispering "If you can hear my voice, clap once." Other strategies she finds helpful include rotations of activities, like during the indoor sessions (due to rain) and, now, with the options of dance and track during soccer sessions. Boucher is interested in seeing how the basketball season compares with soccer, and in learning more about what the program means to elementary-aged participants.

Overall, Project Coach Fellows learn about children across ages, races, and classes. They work with them both in the classroom and after school, at the desk and on the field. They also help with academic assistance by helping to track grades and improve on homework. Undoubtedly, these experiences will help to make them insightful and effective teachers in the future.

2 Million Minutes of High School

2010-10-31T09:16:00.000-07:00

High school youth coaches left the field after playing team-building activities, games like rock-paper-scissors as teams, and walked into the Chestnut Middle School Library where they engaged in a listening activity. Divided into groups, each youth coach had forty five seconds to describe what their post high school goals were. All the other members of the group were instructed to listen. At intervals the youth coaches froze and described what a good listener looked like. Good listeners were focused, made eye contact, kept their chins up, and nodded their heads. When asked how a teacher would react to a good listener one youth coach stated that the teacher would feel like “they are doing their job”. In their forty-five seconds, the coaches spoke with enthusiasm about their future plans. “I want a year of travel” because “what makes you smarter is not school but experience” going to “Miami and stuff”. When asked about funds, the coach responded, “save up and hope to win the lottery”. Another coach stated that she wanted to be an accountant because “I like numbers. I like how much control you have, the pressure. I want to move to California, get married. I already have someone I’ve been dating for a year and a half”. Once the listening activity was over, Sam Intrator asked the coaches how many minutes they spent in high school.

During the second part of the session the youth coaches watched a fragment of the movie “2 Million Minutes”, whose title refers to the number of minutes students spend in high school. The documentary follows two American students, two Indian students and two Chinese students, exploring the cultural, economic and social pressures these students face, emphasizing that US high school students lag behind in math and science. Among twenty-nine developed countries, the US ranks twenty-fourth in math.

After watching twenty minutes of the movie, the coaches discussed what they though the message of the movie was. Many voiced that they thought US students did not take advantage of their education, viewing it as a birthright. They spoke of the difference between the motivation of growing up with economic certainty and the motivation of students for whom education is a passport out of poverty. When the youth coaches were asked what steps could be taken now bridge the US’s lagging behind in math and science, and how they could achieve their own goals, they spoke of putting more of an emphasis on work and work ethics, of trying to do better than they were presently doing by “focusing on school, on yourself”. One youth coach stated that the best time to correct anything was now since they could not correct the past. It was emphasized that school grades are important but that there are also other skills and qualities that are important like the ability to communicate and listen effectively and the ability to lead, all qualities that the youth coaches demonstrate each week. After the discussion, each coach was asked to write a response to two questions. The first question asked about the message they, as coaches, could transmit to their elementary school players. The second question asked them to write down what they would do differently when they got back to school the next day. I will “take school seriously”, a student responded.

Photo Courtesy of Broken Pencil Productions

Here's Johnny! A Closer Look At The Man Behind The Scenes!

2010-10-25T06:47:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has spent time in the North End has probably run into John Rodriguez. The lifelong resident of the North End recently told me about some childhood memories, reflections about the North End today, and why he loves Project Coach.

John was born in Springfield’s North End in 1964, and remembers the neighborhood as family oriented when he was a boy. The parks were always filled with picnics and kids played baseball after school and on the weekends.

John went to school at Brightwood Elementary, down the street from the fields now used by Project Coach. North End children today, he says, are not like they were in the ‘70s. John sees too much drug and crime activity on the streets now, and observes that kids today are more street smart. They have learned to adapt to their environment. He observes another difference: growing up in the North End is tough on a lot of kids because their parents aren’t around. John estimates that in any crowd of 20 kids, only 3 live with both parents. And then he shakes his head.

I asked John why he works as a School Monitor at Gerena Elementary School. John’s answer was much more complex than I anticipated. John is quiet and friendly man who defies the image of a School Monitor. For years he worked in a nearby juvenile jail. He saw a lot of good in the kids he worked with there, but also a lot of despair. The job was tough. He gravitated to Gerena because he wanted to work with kids and give back to his community. But he also wanted intercept these kids and help them chose the right path so they would not end up at the juvenile jail.

John believes in Project Coach. He values it because it offers consistency and a foundation to kids who do not experience much routine or comfort outside of school. And he especially appreciates the confidence that emerges in the children. At the beginning of John’s first year working with Project Coach, he remembers a shy small elementary school girl standing at the fence watching kids play soccer with the program. He went over to her and invited her to play. “Oh no, I’m too shy,” she answered. With a little persuasion she joined the program. John beams as he reflects on the way that little girl blossomed in Project Coach. He chuckles as he tells me that she’s a confident and popular middle school student now. His compassion shines through, he can’t hide it.

By Kuna Tavalin - Project Coach Fellow 2010-2011