Fresh off of presenting at the 2023 AIMS conference, I had great conversations with colleagues that got me thinking about a future presentation topic. If you don’t mind, I would love to use you all as a sounding board on whether this topic may be something that would be useful for you as a Montessorian and whether I should pursue this further. Any feedback would be much appreciated. The title of this blog post is purposely provocative (you did click the link, after all). However, I probably would not be so “clickbaity” with the presentation title. It would be closer to How to Create a Montessori Sports Program: Avoid the Pitfalls and Stay True to the Method.
A little bit of history about sports and my school: no afterschool sports teams existed when I started teaching at Rogers Park Montessori School sixteen years ago. In fact, many parents were anti-sport because they feared that competition brought out the worst in young people. Therefore, it had no place in Montessori education. However, a group of athletic students loved to play basketball together at recess and wanted to play for a school team. Several of them played on travel or park district teams. However, they wanted to play with their classmates; they wanted the experience of playing for their school.
Very hesitantly, we started with one basketball team. One of my assistant coaches had heard about a basketball league many public and Catholic schools used as a "practice league." I would find out later that these teams were not practicing. They were full-fledged teams that had been playing together for years. However, the fact these teams were already pretty good when we were brand new didn’t matter. The league's mission coincided with our philosophy that the essential aspect of the league was sportsmanship and providing another avenue for students to participate and play. You will find that even though it may be the league's mission, not every individual team believes that philosophy, but that is life. Some adults don't have their priorities straight. We knew not everyone would have the same priorities as us, but we also knew that the league thought similarly to ours.
The benefits of joining a league usually outweigh the potential downsides, notably giving up control of your play schedule to someone else. The single greatest resource a league provides is scheduling games. Without a league, your athletic director or coach must contact schools individually to find dates that work for both schools. Going with this approach does give you complete control of your schedule, but the amount of work to do this requires a full-time athletic director or a coach who doesn't need to sleep. The more teams that need to be scheduled, the harder scheduling becomes. It is certainly doable to schedule for one team on your own. However, if your school's sports teams grow to a level like ours did with basketball (10 teams), league play is a must to keep things organized. It is much easier for an outside organization to make the schedule for you.
One of the trickiest things to navigate as a new coach is who will be your assistant coach. Almost always, with new programs, you will need to rely on the help of parents to provide help as an assistant coach. However, parents should only be your program's head coach once you can trust them as an assistant. A school staff member should be the head coach with accountability and program philosophy in mind. Unfortunately, many well-intentioned parents will fall prey to coaching for wins over coaching with an overall guiding philosophy. Also, what is acceptable in coaching in other leagues may not be suitable for your (Montessori) school setting regarding language and attitude. Having parents as assistant coaches lets you preview their coaching style and whether they can be head coaches later. It can be even messier when a staff member is a coach and a parent of a student on the team. The coach/parent and the student need to understand that their relationship is different when coaching and playing for the team. I have seen parent coaches show favoritism for their children or be too hard on them in a way that the coach would not act with any other team member. I have also been blessed with parents/coaches and players who understand their tricky dynamic and navigate it with grace.
That first season, we got defeated by almost every team we played, but it didn’t matter. The student-athletes were playing basketball for their school for the first time. The parents saw that their kids didn't turn into competitive monsters. We even had some younger students come to games to support their friends. The experiment on whether Montessori kids could play organized afterschool sports worked that one year with that one team. However, for an experiment to be valid, it must be repeatable. The following year, some of those students who were cheering the year before joined their friends on the basketball court. That first year we had seven players, and the second year it jumped to fifteen. While we thought about making two teams, a big reason the new crop joined was to play with their friends, so breaking them up wasn’t the right call. Instead, we had one giant team, and we substituted them like hockey for games. One group would play for a while, and a new group would come. While not ideal for continuity, it guaranteed equal playing time, which we decided was an integral feature for our young program.
Overall, the parents didn't care that we were beginners; they saw their kids play on the court for the first time. Being a parent of a young one, I know I will relish the day I see my son participating in some activity with his school, whether it's sports, music, or production. Interestingly, there was a notable side effect on the school community. Parents attending the basketball games could hang out and talk without their kids because they were on the court playing. While the parents were certainly watching their kids, they were also talking, laughing, and making dinner plans afterward. What we observed was that parent-to-parent relationships blossomed. Some of those friendships would last far longer than the season and even outlast their child's tenure at our school. I will see Facebook posts of parents hanging out on vacation together, even though their former RPMS students are in college (and beyond).
Pre-Covid, our basketball system grew to the size of ten teams with close to a hundred players. Throughout this successful program growth, schools would comment on how nice our gym was and how friendly our players were. It was a testament that competition and Montessori could co-exist. While the program has had ups and downs, the net positive is too great to deny. Our sports program has enhanced relationships between player-player, player-coach, and the community. No prospective parent has decided not to send their child to a school because they had a robust athletics program. Granted, parents may send their children to schools that feature something out of the ordinary, like dual language immersion, an arts and music focus, or a farm school. In that case, those parents were not interested in a sports program in the first place. However, especially when there are many attractive choices, parents have often decided on one school over another, with the deciding factor being a more attractive sports program.
In part two, I will use my favorite geometric principle to convince Montessorians how sports and executive functioning are linked.