Part one of Why Your Montessori School Needs Sports featured the history of the Rogers Park Montessori School basketball program. In it, I recounted the humble origins of the program, including the initial resistance to sports being introduced into a Montessori school. However, over time, as the students convinced the parents and school community that Montessori and sports could thrive together, the program grew. In part two, we are going to use my favorite geometric principle, the transitive property, to demonstrate why sports are essential in Montessori.
I’m sure there are plenty of geometry fans who have the transitive property memorized. For those that don’t, to save anyone time looking it up, it can be very simply stated as:
If A = B, and B = C, then A = C
However, we are going to substitute the terms A, B, or C with decision-making, executive functioning, and sportsmanship. Let’s define the terms:
Decision-Making Skills: One of the five pillars of Social Emotional Learning skills is responsible decision-making. Five sub-components constitute it: identifying problems, solving problems, analyzing situations, goal setting, and leadership skills.
Executive Functioning: According to Harvard, it is “skills that underlie the capacity to plan ahead and meet goals, display self-control, follow multiple-step directions even when interrupted, and stay focused despite distractions, among others.” Montessori schools will always mention how the Montessori method is one of the best approaches for students to build executive functioning skills based on choice. It is one of the cornerstones of Montessori education.
Sportsmanship: To save time, the two definitions I use are Be Fun to Play With, Be Fun to Play Against, and Value the Long Term Over the Short Term. For a more complete explanation, please read this article published in Montessori Alliance.
If Sports(manship) build decision-making skills
And Decision-Making Skills are Executive Functioning Skills
Then Sports(manship) Builds Executive Functioning Skills
Sports(manship) builds decision-making skills
When the students repeat the mantra Be Fun to Play With, Be Fun to Play Against, it will remind them to analyze the situation like a flow chart. This will help them identify and solve problems, which will invariably will help them with leadership skills as they work toward conflict resolution.
Decision-Making Skills are Executive Function Skills
A cornerstone of Executive Functioning Skills is making a plan, which to do so requires identifying problems and imagining solutions. Once a plan is made, someone must create goals to assess the progress of the plan, which is literally goal setting and analyzing the situation.
One more time:
If Sports(manship) build decision-making skills
And Decision-Making Skills are Executive Functioning Skills
Then Sports(manship) Builds Executive Functioning Skills
If we Montessorians truly believe that one of the biggest advantages of Montessori is the capacity for students to engage executive functioning skills, we would be foolish to ignore a potentially significant avenue for the practice of said skills. However, a possible reason Montessorians hesitate to see sports as a valid teaching tool is that it is much harder to control for error. There are many ways that a sports program can turn sour and the experience not beneficial for students if not conducted properly. Like a Montessori classroom, we must prepare the environment. The way to prepare it is by making the mission statement of your athletics program abundantly clear to everyone and making the base of the program anchored to sportsmanship.
The goal or purpose of your program is to create student-athletes who understand and demonstrate sportsmanship, are good teammates, work hard, and are committed to getting better individually and as a team. If your team follows the goals of your program, you will find that your school will create enhanced school spirit, it will build better relationships with other schools, and social skills between your students will be enhanced. Winning is not the goal or purpose of your Montessori athletics program. Winning may be a result, but it should never be the goal. A team that demonstrates sportsmanship, are good teammates, works hard, and is committed to improvement will have a better chance of winning a game or championship. However, if winning becomes the ultimate goal of your program, you are guaranteed to have a program that sacrifices the Montessori philosophy, which should be a deal-breaker as a Montessori school. No sports program is worth the price of honesty, decency, friendship, proper behavior, or your school’s ethos.
The role of the coaches and athletic director is to be a guide the same way a classroom teacher guides their students. There are potentially many pitfalls when sportsmanship is not held to the highest degree within competition. That is why sportsmanship must be at the center or the base of any athletic endeavor at your Montessori School. Not making sportsmanship your highest priority is gambling on whether the student-athletes and coaches will naturally display the tenets of good sportsmanship. Unfortunately, the thrill and good feelings associated with winning are addictive, and if left unchecked, winning can slowly become the focus. A good coach or athletic director must have a long-term view of the sports program and not focus on individual games or one season. We must focus on the program, which should last many years.
Winning at all costs, including forsaking good sportsmanship, shouldn’t feel as good as winning the right way if we are being honest with ourselves. However, we tend to hide behind a win as justification for poor sportsmanship. Winning tends to silence the cognitive dissonance players and coaches may feel, knowing they are winning the wrong way. However, it will all come back to bite you in the butt as soon as you lose. Instead of being able to learn from the loss the way we should, it will quickly deescalate into blame, and they will learn nothing from the loss. They have now lost the most important aspect of a loss, which is the analysis of oneself and the team and then figuring out what to improve. This is how we get better. Pointing fingers at one another or the ref means there will be zero growth.
A common and sometimes tricky situation is when one student-athlete is far better than their peers. Sometimes that excellent player does not care that their peers are not as good and they are fun to play with. This dream scenario is not always the case, however. Some excellent players get very frustrated with teammates that do not have a similar skill set as their own. Even if their teammates are trying their best, it could be perceived that they are not giving full effort, which will upset your top athlete. If left unchecked, this could result in your top athlete trying to win the game by themselves, ball-hogging, and not being fun to play with. This could mean that your top athlete is going to harshly criticize teammates, which will hurt feelings and potentially lead to players quitting. We do not want either scenario.
If you are able to, have the better player play on several teams, one that is their age level and one that is at the upper limit of their ability. Each team teaches them two different things. Playing on their age-level team teaches them how to interact with players that are not as skilled. The focus is that they must be good teammates with players that are still learning. As the coach, we need to speak with them privately about the long term. The age-level team is going to be the ones they play with most of their time at school. They are not playing just one season with them, but many seasons. This means that your more skilled and competitive athletes will have to buy into Be Fun to Play With, Be Fun to Play Against, more so than winning. Making sure they take care of the relationships with people on their team is more important than the outcome of a game. If they burn bridges being overly critical or mean to a teammate evaporates the culture of the team for the future. However, these highly skilled players need an outlet to utilize their skills at their highest level. This is why they need another team where they are not the alpha anymore. Now they can unleash their full athletic potential with players similar to their skillset. This balance hopefully allows them to grow their skills individually. When they are in their last years with their classmates as middle schoolers, they have cemented the leadership skills needed to be successful.