Students learn real-life lessons from coaches
Managing training schedule, winning and losing games equip pupils for the future
Derek Doucet, teacher and 1st boys basketball and tennis coach at Lakefield College School in Lakefield, Ont., answered the knock on his hotel-room door at 11:30 p.m. to find one of the students he coached with tears running down his face.
The stress of figuring out where to go to school, what to do with his life and listening to what his parents wanted him to do was too much, the student revealed. So Doucet stepped in: He connected the student with counsellors at the coed school when they returned from their out-oftown competition and continued to check in on him.
To the team, the coach is an important figure with whom they form a bond. The coach is often a teacher from the school, so students may already know him or her from class. In a team setting, however, the coach becomes more of a mentor to students.
On another trip, while onboard a plane, Doucet overheard a student tell friends he found a credit card on the plane and used it to buy movies. Doucet decided to use the incident as a learning opportunity for the student (and ensured the money was paid back).
“(The incident) may have steered him on a different path,” says Doucet. “When your life path forks, where are you going to go? I think we helped that kid stay on the right path.” Doucet says the beauty of school sports is the team mentality, the type that is difficult to replicate in a classroom. On the court “everybody is working toward the same goal” and they feel they have the ability to achieve.
Marcello Lio is department chair of health and physical education, and head football coach at Villanova College, a coed private school in King City, Ont. Lio played football throughout high school and college before playing at a professional level in Italy and Germany. That experi- ence better enabled him to support a student who had been thinking of quitting his team.
Lio had advised him to “think about the process more than the outcome and what it can do for him to fight through the tough times. It’s everything we talk about in the game itself transpiring into real-life situations.” The student stuck it through and became a starter by his third year. To this day, he and Lio stay in touch and he thanks Lio for his advice.
Coaching enables a whole different relationship with students, says Julie Guarasci, health and physical education curriculum and department leader at St. Clement’s School, an allgirls private school in Toronto. It’s a “different kind of dialogue that you have with the students,” she says, citing a student who had approached her for help. The student didn’t know how to explain to her parents what she was feeling so she came to Guarasci to ask her to mediate a conversation.
“We really try to work on participation and risk-taking, which often translates later to the classroom or to these kinds of conversations,” says Guarasci. “When a young student has to approach an adult, they are taking a lot of risks, they’re very brave, and I think coaching helps to take those barriers down.”