By John Nagy '00M.A.
If you're a red-faced hockey dad in Massachusetts, a high-strung cheerleading mom in Texas or
some other species of overzealous sports parent, be warned. A Notre Dame educator is deploying
a small army of coaches to change the tone of kids' sports -- starting with Catholic youth
leagues -- and they agree that you are a big part of the problem.
A group of about 30 coaches and youth ministers from South Bend and places as far
away as Ireland gathered in June at Notre Dame for the first Sports as Ministry workshop, just as
the campus began to swell with its annual inflow of sports campers.
The workshop is an outgrowth of the work of Professor F. Clark Power and his
colleagues based at the University's Center for Ethical Education (CEE). It represents the first
step toward a comprehensive program for Catholic youth sports that Power says puts kids and
their developmental needs first. Participants reflected on coaching philosophy and talked about
some of the problems they have encountered in youth sports. Then they were trained to partner
with parents and athletic boards to address these problems.
For Power, a specialist in character development who teaches in the University's
psychology and liberal studies programs, the focus is not on winning or creating the next
generation of star athletes. Instead, he says, the workshop stresses that sports should be an
opportunity for kids to have fun, develop a sense of fair play and respect, and build the decision-making skills they will need to become healthy adults.
CEE research, reported in the summer issue of this magazine, surveyed parents' and
athletes' bad behavior and found plenty of cause for the high levels of sports burn-out that other
studies have discovered among kids 13 and under. These behaviors were especially egregious in
Catholic programs.
Power finds this inexcusable. "Catholic programs are not making a difference. That alone
should be motivating. If you're not getting your religious values across, why do it? You're
actually giving the Church a bad name."
The Sports as Ministry program, which Power developed in conjunction with Greg Dobie
Moser, director of the Diocese of Cleveland's youth and young adult ministries, takes its cues
from scripture and such Catholic sources as Pope John Paul II, golfer Jack Nicklaus, the
Catechism and the theologian Hugo Rahner. "To play," Rahner once wrote, "is to yield oneself
to a kind of magic . . . to enter into a world where different laws apply."
The win-at-all-costs mentality so often found in youth sports snuffs the value Rahner
found in sports. Power says that children's natural inclinations to play and compete have given
way to adults' interests in getting their children ahead in life. The CEE research noted that
neither boys nor girls put winning among the top seven reasons they want to play sports.
According to the workshop materials, when coaches focus on helping players set goals, build
relationships and take ownership of the game, "winning will take care of itself."
As a former youth coach, Power knows well that selling coaches on character
development alone is a turn-off. He remembers how men's soccer coach Bobby Clark, one of
several Notre Dame coaches to help Power craft the programs, admonished him to "talk about
winning."
No problem. Although "Sports as Ministry" will target younger kids, Power can point to
famously successful programs that seem to share his philosophy at the high school and college
levels. There are stellar examples in Notre Dame's proud tradition, of course. But note also that
Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, has the highest winning percentage of any
Division III football school in history, much of which has come under Coach John Gagliardi's
"Winning-with-no" rules, which include "No hazing tolerated"; "No trash talk tolerated"; "No
rules, except the Golden Rule."
At the Gilman School in Baltimore, coaches won't allow players to let any other Gilman
boy eat lunch alone. They remind players at every practice that the coaches' job is to love them.
The high school went undefeated in 2005, won its second consecutive state football
championship in its division and finished 12th in the USA TODAY national poll.
At the youth level, Power says the emphasis should be on equal playing time, a concept
that parents of some exceptional athletes view as a policy of enforced mediocrity. "But I think
there's a lot of hypocrisy here," he says. "A lot of people will say sport builds character. Then
why wouldn't you give kids equal time to get good at this?"
(October 2006)
