Transcript
Megan: One thing that we aren't good at in sport is differentiated instruction. We think all young people should be able to track what the coach is saying, they should be able to focus when they need to, they should be able to respond to adversity in a positive way without getting bumped under the boards and coming up swinging, which for some young people, that amount of stress really is threatening.
And so I think we are not good at figuring out what different kids need at different times in sport. It's a little "my way or the highway" in sport.
Kevin: Nearly 30 million U.S. children and teens participate in some form of organized sports. While sports have physical health benefits for kids, they can also benefit a child's mental, emotional, and social health.
How can sports help kids heal, grow, and thrive? Why is it important to provide kids with high-quality healing sports? And what can parents and schools do to ensure a healthy sports environment for kids?
This is "What I Want to Know," and today, I am joined by Megan Bartlett to find out.
Megan Bartlett is the founder of the Center for Healing and Justice Through Sport, a national nonprofit working to ensure more young people and athletes have access to sports experiences that are healing-centered, inclusive, and address issues of systemic injustice. She joins us today to share how sports can help kids heal, grow, and thrive.
Megan, welcome to the show.
Megan: Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me.
Kevin: You are doing some really interesting work. I want to get into this idea of what healing sports are and how kids can grow and thrive by being involved in sports, but I also have to ask how you got into this work. Because this isn't something I would imagine that when you're 7, 8 years old, you say, "I want to grow up and do this kind of work."
Megan: That's right.
Kevin: How did you get here?
Megan: You're exactly right. This is not something that I knew you could do or that was sort of available to me when I was a little kid, except that I did know how much I loved sports.
And I did know that it was a place where I sort of felt like I belonged, felt like I could watch myself grow, felt like I was . . . It was a joyful enough experience that I wanted to keep doing it.
And so after playing soccer in college, I ended up as a college soccer coach graduate assistant. And then I thought, "I'm not sure I want to coach at the college level." As much as I love sport, I'm sort of more interested in how to do something good with sport.
I ended up working for an organization called America SCORES, which is a soccer creative writing and service-learning program. There's DC SCORES in D.C.
Kevin: That's right. I know them. Yes.
Megan: Yep. And I ended up working there, and really, it opened my eyes to the fact that sport is actually not something equally accessible to everyone. Certainly, quality sport is not equally accessible to everyone.
And so it became really interesting to me to think about how sport could be leveraged to create more equity and to help kids gain skills that would help them be successful wherever they went, not just on the sport field.
Kevin: That's pretty fascinating, especially when you talk about the idea of quality sport. What does that mean?
Megan: I think anybody who had a bad experience in sport knows that it's not a given that every sport experience will be good. I believe that the biggest factor in quality sport is an adult who facilitates the right kind of environment.
And that doesn't mean that they're sort of overscheduling the environment or mandating everything that happens, but really facilitates an experience where young people feel safe, where they feel connected, and where they have the right dose of challenge.
Not something that overwhelms them and not something that's not challenging enough for them, but really gives them the right sort of Goldilocks challenge where they see themselves get better, where they start to believe . . . They go from thinking, "Oh, I can't do that," to, "I can do anything if I work hard, if somebody will help me, if somebody will show me what to do."
So quality sport experiences, I think, have all of those elements: great relationships, they feel psychologically and physically safe, and they have the right dose of challenge for young people.
Kevin: One thing along these lines, and this is not intended to be a pejorative question, but one that I would assume you've dealt with before. Does this mean participation trophies? You know what I mean?
Megan: Yeah, of course.
Kevin: People might hear this and they may ask the question. So how does that play out when you have a wide range of skill levels on any given team?
Megan: Yeah. It's interesting. I think participation trophies have definitely become this sort of third rail in sport.
Kevin: Symbol.
Megan: Right. And I think the real challenge in what we're talking about when we talk about equity and access is that some young people have enough experience in youth sport that they're ready for the more challenging environment. And that's great.
Playing through a season, and experiencing the ups and downs, and coming together during the postseason, and winning a championship, all of that is incredible life experience for young people.
I think the challenge is we expect young people to be ready for that even when sometimes they aren't. Even when we haven't . . .
Kevin: Even if they have the skill level.
Megan: Totally. Even if they have the skill level, but haven't had enough practice at what it means to pick yourself up and try again, win well, lose well, do all the things that come along with the realities of a competitive sport experience.
And so I think for some kids, just participating is the win for them at that moment.
Kevin: Got it.
Megan: And when we think about what some young people are facing in other parts of their lives, the fact that they can get themselves to a sport practice and just be there, and be safe, and be enjoying themselves is a win, and they should be rewarded for the work it takes to do that.
I think one thing that we aren't good at in sport is differentiated instruction. We're good at it from a sport skill perspective, but we're not good at it from a social and emotional skill perspective.
We think all young people should be able to track what the coach is saying, they should be able to focus when they need to, they should be able to respond to adversity in a positive way without getting bumped under the boards and coming up swinging, which for some young people, that amount of stress really is threatening.
And so I think we are not good at figuring out what different kids need at different times in sport. It's a little "my way or the highway" in sport.
Kevin: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And the more I think about it, you're now sort of teasing my thought process, Megan, which is good. That's what led to "What I Want to Know." I just am infinitely curious about things like this.
I had never thought of it, but it just struck me that when we talk about how teachers interact with students, there's a growing cry for more substantive, meaningful, taking into account social and emotional learning and everything, professional development of teachers. It almost seems like we need the same thing for coaches . . .
Megan: Absolutely.
Kevin: . . . since it does come back to the adults.
And the other thing is . . . I'm going to read a quote from this amazing person, Megan Bartlett, and I want to get your thoughts on this quote.
Megan: Uh-oh.
Kevin: You tease out something that I also think is important for coaches and adults who work with students in sport, that they understand. And that is you want every coach and youth development practitioner to learn about the brain so they can understand the unique ability that sport has to help kids heal, grow, and thrive.
I really don't think that most of the young coaches that coach CYO basketball or AAU . . . they're not thinking about that.
Megan: They are not.
Kevin: And so this idea of professional development, I analogize that to what we are now wanting teachers to focus more on. I want to hear your thoughts on that and how we can make it more universal or begin the process, even if it's a few pilots around the country, where folks are thinking about this.
Megan: You're absolutely right. We need so much more investment in the development of coaches. I often say that the only thing you can do without any training with young people is parent them and coach them.
Every other adult who works with a young person has to show some evidence that they understand something about youth development, or human development, or some kind of thing related to a young person. And in coaching, we don't.
We're happy to, in lots of cases, just drop our kids off with a coach and just trust that they're going to have a good experience, when we know that's not true. They very well might not have a good experience because we don't invest in coaches in that way.
And I think certainly the idea of helping all coaches understand something about the brain . . . When I get in front of a room of coaches and show them a picture of the brain, that is not what they signed up for, right?
But I think what we've found is that there are a handful of core concepts that if you understand them, about really basic brain functioning, it actually can change your approach to young people generally, but also to a sport environment.
And so, about 15 years ago, I read a book by a guy named Bruce Perry. The book is called "The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog," and it's about the impact of trauma on the brain. It's about the impact of overwhelming stress, living in chaotic environments, being a minority in a majority culture, all the things that we know can, over time, really change the way the brain functions.
As I was reading it, I was having one of those moments where, like Russell Crowe in "A Beautiful Mind," things were coming off the page. He was talking about clinical environments and education environments. And I said, "You know what? You can get these things that you need to help kids heal in this unique combination in sport that you really can't get in other environments, because sport combines them more naturally."
So in sport, you get this opportunity to have, if you do it right, the relationships that make someone feel safe. A young person who comes into a sport experience, having been overwhelmed by stress, having had traumatic experiences, an adult who they can trust and will take care of them helps them feel safe and let their guard down.
Movement, we know, is incredibly powerful when it comes to helping redo the chemistry in our brain that's been changed by the experience of trauma.
And so we've got positive relationships. We've got movement. Patterned, repetitive, rhythmic activity helps us reset our stress response. And then we have this idea of building resilience.
When young people have experienced overwhelming stress, one of the things I always think of is our tendency is to want to wrap them up in bubble wrap and hope nothing bad ever happens to them again. That's a caretaking instinct, and you can see how that would help kids avoid further harm, but it doesn't actually help them heal. The opposite of overwhelming stress is not no stress. It's the right dose of stress.
And so the opportunity in sport of having a little bit of stress and being able to recover, and having a little bit more and being able to recover, and continuing to challenge yourself, whether you're challenging yourself with a layup or you're challenging yourself with some other kind of interpersonal skill, you get to practice them there.
And putting those three things together in a sport environment is, I think, magic and totally underutilized when it comes to how we get kids ready to learn, how we get them ready to function in the rest of their lives.
Kevin: How does this interplay with the sort of old-school coaching mindset that still exists that includes a little bit of the tough love? And yet for some kids who are involved in that sort of team old-school way, there's this sense of belonging that works.
Megan: Absolutely.
Kevin: So what are the tweaks that need to be put in place, if you get what I'm saying, in terms of rounding out that experience and making sure that all the kids benefit?
Megan: We talk about tough love all the time. It is the constant sort of refrain when we're talking to coaches. And one of the things that I think when it comes to tough love that's true is that we think it's the tough that works, but it's the love that works.
Kevin: I've never heard that. That's pretty good. That's another Megan quotable quote right there. I like that.
Megan: What we know from the neurobiology of development is that young people are going to learn best when they feel safe, when they feel supported, when they know someone has their back.
I think often what happens with coaches who are sort of stereotypically tough-love coaches is that they're successful despite the tough, not because of it. They're successful because those kids actually do know that that person will show up for them in a way that someone may not in other parts of their lives, even if they're on the sideline yelling like a lunatic.
Kevin: Well, it's interesting. I grew up in Indiana and I played basketball. I was just . . .
Megan: Well, that's the place to play basketball.
Kevin: I was a small college All-American. In fact, I'm surprised you don't know me because you were deemed the person most likely to win team trivia. You know all this stuff.
Megan: I am. I am a little notorious.
Kevin: I'm surprised you don't know about my accomplishments, if you will. But the thing is, growing up in Indiana during the time of Bobby Knight, his players adored him. I hadn't thought about this emphasis on the love part of tough love. I've talked to Isaiah Thomas, and Mike Woodson, and all these folks, and they just adored him. So there must be something of what you're saying.
Megan: Yeah, I think despite his antics, those young people knew he would show up for them in other parts of their lives. And there were a lot of young people who didn't thrive under Bobby Knight. They had to leave, they had to transfer, they had to . . .
Kevin: That's right.
Megan: And so what we think about is, are you a coach who can gather enough young people who will put up with your antics in order to do these other things, or are you trying to be a coach who can include more kids, who can be better for more kinds of kids?
Kevin: That's what I want to ask you about. Part of what you're trying to do is ensure that there's inclusivity and equity. So how does that all relate?
Megan: I think that's the part where you're trying to be the kind of coach who can work for more kinds of kids, right? Different kids need different kinds of coaching at different times.
I think it's sort of this classic equality versus equity question. Fair is not necessarily equal. If you create the right team environment, then I think kids know better than anyone that certain kinds of young people need different kinds of coaching for different kinds of things.
And in sport, we know it implicitly when it comes to skill development. On a basketball team, you have one kid who can go to his left really well, you have one kid who can pull up, you have one kid . . . The coaching matches that from a skill development level, but it almost never matches it from a sort of interpersonal development level. And it can, and it should.
So many of the same strategies work. You have to think about the things you're trying to develop in young people as skills that they need instead of this idea that they are sort of acting out against you or that they're trying to take power from you.
If you can create an environment where the assumption is not that a young person is here to ruin your day, that they actually need some skills that would help them focus or do the thing you want them to do, in the same way when you want them to learn how to do a crossover, the same teaching strategies are there if we think about skills more broadly.
Kevin: Are there examples that come to mind of coaches or, in your experience, people that you interacted with that have employed this differentiated coaching approach to reach all the kids?
Megan: One of my favorite coaches is a guy who coaches here in Boston. He's a youth development coach, and he coaches in a lacrosse program that he was a participant in when he was a young person. Lacrosse is not a sport that has a long history of working in underserved communities, but this program is targeting the communities that have been historically disinvested in, in Boston.
And one of the things that this guy, Pat Cronin, knows about his young people is that at the end of a long day in a school that doesn't necessarily cater to their needs, in a community where they may not feel safe walking from home to school or school to lacrosse, or wherever they are, they need some transition time. They need the opportunity to be able to sort of opt in and opt out of stressful experiences in a way that gives them some control.
And so what Pat did was he created this little station at lacrosse practice, which was nothing fancier than a chalk drawing on a blacktop next to a wall, and said, "Any time you need to throw the ball against the wall, you can. You can go there and throw the ball against the wall. And it's sort of just your reset zone." Everybody needs a reset at some point.
The genius of what Pat did with the reset zone was he would sometimes send the whole team there. And this skill of throwing the ball against the wall is also skill-building. It never felt like a punishment. It was something that would actually make them better.
He'd sometimes send the whole team. He would sometimes send himself to the zone. He'd be like, "Okay, you guys finish that. I need to get a few reps in." He would sometimes just go with one other young person. He'd sometimes send two young people. He would always let young people choose to go get a reset and come back when they needed to.
And I think originally everybody was like, "Oh, no. What if somebody chooses to just be in the zone the whole practice?" Well, number one, that's telling you something about that young person. But number two, it never happened. Young people really used it as a way to say, "I can feel myself not at my best. How do I get myself at my best?" And it's an incredible thing to watch as young people do it in real time.
Kevin: Yeah, it's pretty powerful. Deion Sanders has gotten a lot of attention recently, and I worked with him a little bit when he had his charter school outside of Dallas. And when I visited him, it's an interesting story because he has all this flash and all this . . . He's very media savvy.
One of his parents of one of the students said that every Wednesday, he would load up a van and take a group of parents and students to Golden Corral for dinner. He didn't have any handlers or any . . . Just him, parents, and a handful of the players. Every Wednesday, he would schedule his time so that he was always in Dallas on that Wednesday.
And he included everyone, but it would be rotating. When I was seeing how successful he was as a coach on a college level, I said, "Okay, I get it now." This whole idea of every kid feeling like he had their back.
Megan: Totally.
Kevin: It was huge.
Megan: Yeah. If I'm going to ask you to invest in what I'm selling, then I need to invest in you.
Kevin: Yeah. You've talked about some sports are healing sports. What do you mean by that, and what are those sports?
Megan: Well, any sport can be a healing sport if you do it the right way. And we get this question all the time. I know a young person who is really dysregulated, has had a lot of experiences in their lives that make it hard for them to function in other group environments, or they're having a tough time in school. What should they do?
And it's less about which exact sport they find, although some sports are a little bit more naturally supportive of young people who have different kinds of challenges, right?
Kevin: I get it.
Megan: Young people who particularly are going to react to chaotic environments maybe shouldn't join a football team right away. Kids who are particularly going to be dysregulated by touch with other people, again, football might not be exactly the right place. Although eventually, the idea is you can and, in some ways I would say, should run football programs in a way that allows young people to get comfortable with all of those things. What great practice.
But I think the most important thing is, number one, that the young person is choosing that sport. It's something that appeals to them, something that makes them feel good about themselves when they do it.
And number two, it has a coach who is attending to things like, "Is this young person going to have a harder time when we're doing things where it's loud?" A basketball gym that is particularly loud could be sort of dysregulating for certain kinds of young people.
Kevin: I see.
Megan: Regular practice might be fine, right? But game day, when all that extra noise is in the gym, you want a coach who's paying attention to whether or not that's an environment a young person is ready for, or if that's really what's causing them to be more likely to get into a fight with a teammate or an opposing kid, be more likely to talk back to a coach, be less likely to actually be able to take in instruction when you're trying to give them instruction.
One of the things we know happens in sport all the time is a young person looks like they're listening to you, but they actually can't process what's going on because there are too many other things in the environment that are keeping them from doing that.
And so I think it's really about how a coach is attending to the things we know you need from sport, and helping sort of scaffold to an environment where a young person can be successful.
Kevin: Yeah, that makes sense.
A couple more questions, Megan. First of all, your organization, Center for Healing and Justice through Sport, what do you do?
Megan: We spend a lot of time with coaches. We spend a lot of time training coaches, helping them understand these core concepts of Dr. Perry, whose book I mentioned before. Really, his work around some of the very basic things of neurobiology that helps us understand behavior.
So we train coaches to understand some of those things, to really be creative about their strategies, to differentiate for young people, create environments that they need.
We know that there's only so much you can do in one-on-one relationships with coaches. There are always going to be new coaches starting to coach their kids or starting to get into the field. If we're not changing some of what is expected of coaches, then we're not going to have long-term success. So we do some systems change work around coaching, which includes things like . . . There's no accountability for coaches really at any level. The only accountability . . .
Kevin: Wins and losses.
Megan: Right. The only accountability for coaches is whether or not they win and their athletic director wants to keep them in that job.
But at the youth level, there's no accountability. The only places we get anywhere close to accountability in sport are school-based sports, because typically those folks are at least employees of the school district.
But in youth sport, there's no body that oversees who's doing what, and who's been trained to do what, or even tracks. You can't go somewhere and say, "This is the person who's coaching my kids. Have they received any training? What’s their background?" That's not part of the sport system yet, and we really think it should be, and are working with some city-level and, in some cases, state-level agencies to make sure that there's a little bit more accountability.
And investment, right? We can't just say, "Coaches should be trained," and it's up to you to figure it out. There also needs to be an investment in making sure that these are the kinds of adults that anyone would want their kid to be spending a significant amount of time with and having a significant influence over their kids.
Kevin: Yeah. One last question, and it really relates to what you've just been talking about. We have a lot of school leaders that listen to the show, and there may be an athletic director at a high school or a gym teacher who coaches programs at an elementary school who listens to this and they're intrigued by it.
So what I really want to know is what advice would you give to those school leaders who are either involved in coaching or overseeing coaching programs in their schools on how to begin the process of moving in the direction of healing sports? They may have heard this, but they're like, "Okay, now what do I do with it?"
Megan: I think, first and foremost, it's really important as a space for us to recognize coaches for the kind of impact that they have. I think some coaches are sort of disproportionately recognized for their impact if they win a bunch of state championships or something like that, but generally, it is not glamorous work and it is not really rewarded work in the way that I think it can and should be.
We find that if you spend time with coaches, if you really invest and say, "What you're doing is important, what you're doing is having a real impact, so let's all think about the best ways we can do it," that's a huge step in the right direction.
Generally, coaches are doing some good things that, with some tweaks, often a school leader will know about because it's something they want their teachers to do, or it's a way they want the school environment to look.
I think the first steps are often sort of recognition of the impact and power of coaches, and then some investment in them and their development. Say, "It matters to me that you're winning your games and that young people are having a great experience." We know that those things are not mutually exclusive.
Kevin: Yeah. Megan Bartlett, thank you so much for all you do, and thank you for joining us on "What I Want to Know."
Megan: Thank you for having me.
Kevin: Thanks for listening to "What I Want to Know." Be sure to follow and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, so you can explore other episodes and dive into our discussions on the future of education.
Write a review of the show. I also encourage you to join the conversation and let me know what you want to know using #WIWTK on social media.
For more information on Stride and online education, visit stridelearning.com.
I'm your host, Kevin P. Chavous. Thank you for joining "What I Want to Know."
Meet Megan
Megan Bartlett is the founder of The Center for Healing and Justice Through Sport, a national nonprofit working to ensure more young people and athletes have access to sports experiences that are healing-centered, inclusive, and address issues of systemic injustice.
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What I Want to Know
In this podcast, you will hear from leaders in education as we talk through learning solutions for homeschool, online school, education pathways, and topics tailored specifically to online students and parents.
