Project Coach Fact Sheet
Project Coach taught me how to be a leader, because all the little kids from the club call me coach. And when I go around the neighborhood, all you hear is a bunch of “heys,” a
bunch of hugs from everybody. --Coach Kenny, 15-year-old 8th
Grader, and First-year coach, Holyoke
Giving back to the kids in the neighborhood is the best thing I can do with my time. If we weren’t coaching them (the kids) they would be home watching tv and playing video
games.
--Coach Amanda, 17, Springfield I think it’s a GREAT idea to have teenagers coaching us. Teenagers understand us and
they make it fun!
--4th – grade boy, Springfield The Project Coach Idea:
Project Coach teaches economically disadvantaged minority youth living in the distressed communities of Holyoke and Springfield, Massachusetts to be sport coaches and to organize youth sports leagues for elementary aged youth in neighborhood sport leagues. Our coach education academy helps our teens become goal setters, communicators, and initiative-takers. As a by-product of cultivating these capabilities, our coaches create opportunities for children to have fun, have contact with “cool” neighborhood mentors, and practice habits of wellness and health. Our coaches become homegrown talent for local youth organizations and community centers. Project Coach builds capacity for neighborhoods from the inside out.
Project Coach by the numbers:
In its first year of operation (2005 -2006), Project Coach provided afterschool
programming for 20 adolescent coaches and 120 second-fifth-grade children attending the Gerena Community School (Springfield, MA). During 2006-2007, the project has increased the number of adolescent coaches to approximately 35, and has added a sport’s program at the Holyoke Boys and Girls Club (Holoke, MA). It is estimated that, overall, 200 children will participate at the two sites.
Project Coach’s Objectives:
1. Project Coach develops leadership skills and promotes generalizable assets in our youth coaches that can be transferred to success in school, employment, relationships, and other community endeavors. Coaching is an activity that provides unique access to a role and to behaviors linked with success across a range of domains. Successful coaches must be goal setters, communicators, and planners. They need to be able to take charge and build a sense of teamwork and camaraderie. Effective coaches must learn to develop the capacity to think
strategically and plan deliberatively. They must learn to execute plans across time and simultaneously perform in a context that demands quick-fire judgments, initiative-taking, and improvisational thinking. Coaches must motivate
themselves, inspire others, and create conditions for their players to learn about themselves. Coaches practice and deploy many of the skills indispensable for success in classrooms and the world of work. Our Project Coach Academy curriculum teaches this indispensable skill set and works to help our youth coaches internalize achievement behaviors and values that help them become more successful in school and in their communities. They become role models for their players as they become aware of their own possibilities and emerging
competencies.
2. PC builds the capacity of local community organizations by providing a cadre of well-trained and knowledgeable youth workers—who happen to be teenagers. This is particularly important, in Springfield and Holyoke—two communities that have suffered from a chronic shortage and relentless turnover of qualified coaches and youth workers. Our coaches work in organizations that they themselves attended such as elementary schools and Boys and Girls clubs. Our model seeks to recruit local neighborhood youth to serve as leaders and mentors and in doing so PC delivers a message to the participants and the community that
adolescents—often depicted as troubled and dangerous—can be competent citizens that create positive community change.
3. PC’s emphasis on sports and health provides opportunities for elementary school aged children living in these underserved communities to engage in and enjoy physical activity. Providing regular opportunities for exercise is particularly important given the overweight/ obesity crises in our country and in the communities we serve. We also teach sport skills and emphasize games that coaches and players may wish to utilize in their free time, or pursue into adolescents (when disengagement from physical activity is particularly problematic). Teaching sports also provides opportunities for coaches and elementary-aged youth to become aware of health behaviors including proper nutrition, and tobacco, alcohol and drug avoidance.
4. PC provides a range of opportunities for Smith College graduate and undergraduate students to gain experience working with urban youth in an educational setting. Reams of research suggest that aspiring educators need on-the-ground preparation experience in urban contexts if they are to become successful teachers. Our program provides a range of apprenticeships for college and graduate students, including: teaching, grant-writing, program evaluation, mentoring, running workshops, and working directly with elementary school students and adolescents. Given the dramatic attrition rate of new teachers in our urban school systems, providing opportunities for energized and idealistic college students to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to be successful in an urban context is a critical element in effectively preparing highly qualified teachers.
Project Coach Academy Curriculum:
Project Coach teaches the following curriculum to its adolescent coaches. Typically 7-1.5 hour coaching sessions precede a 12 session sports program (in soccer or basketball), and then coaching classes continue as coaches work with their teams. We provide continuous verbal and video feedback to coaches on how lessons from classroom sessions are
operationalized in the gymnasium or on the playing fields. Presently, we have 3-4 cycles of the coaching academy and sports programs each year (i.e., 30 – 40 weeks of
programming -- 15-20 weeks of programming at each of our two sites).
1. Philosophy of coaching and youth sports: Exploration or coaches’ experience, knowledge, values, opinions and beliefs about sports and the development of a credo of coaching.
2. Communication I: Principles of interpersonal communication and public speaking techniques with a focus on the kinds of communication needed to be an effective sport coach.
3. Games Based approach to Sports: Introduces fundamental ideas and practices involving teaching sports using a games-based approach where all aspects of the sport, from the basic skills to more technical moves and strategies, are taught in the context of fun, yet instructive, games.
4. Self-Regulation: Coaches must be able to set goals, regulate their attention, and work with focus in environments spilling over with distractions. Attending to issues of goal setting, self-monitoring, self-awareness and developing strategies for monitoring one’s attentional capacities including focusing, controlling distractions, and monitoring affective state.
5. Communication 2: Refining skills of communication with a focus on the invention, writing, and delivery of communication to the varied audiences coaches must communicate with in our program: children, supervisors, parents, referees,
fundraisers and others. Introduction to the principles of peer feedback and the use of assessment instruments.
6. Principles of Child Development: Introduction to cognitive, social, and physical stages of development as related to the children that coaches will work with in the program. Special attention on how to work with children in-group situations and on understanding the ‘slanty-line’ approach to physical and sport development.
7. Conflict Resolution and Peer Mediation: Coaches must develop a skill set that allows them to facilitate resolving disputes between players on their own team or between their team and opponents. The approach we use has proven to be effective in helping change the way students understand and resolve conflict in their lives.
8. Community Assets Approach: Introduces ideas about what makes a community safe and productive for children and exploration of how Project Coach seeks to contribute to the local community. Coaches learn that healthy children need access to external assets such as families, schools, congregations, neighborhoods, and youth
perseverance if they are to be better prepared for situations in life that challenge their inner strength and confidence.
9. Sport Specific Training: coaches attend a clinic focused on the skills, techniques, tactics and fundamentals of coaching the in-season sport. For soccer, Massachusetts Youth Soccer presents the clinic. For basketball, the women’s basketball coach at Amherst College runs the clinic.
10. Sport First Aid: Session taught by a physician focused on basic principles and skills needed to respond to an ill or injured athlete.
Project Coach Staff:
The Co-Project Directors are Smith professors Don Siegel and Sam Intrator. Siegel has an Ed.D. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is in his 32nd year as a professor of Exercise and Sport Studies (ESS). He helped develop and also served as the director of Smith’s ESS graduate program that specializes in training college coaches. It is the only program in the country accredited at Level IV by the National Council for Accreditation of Coaching Education. He has also been an urban youth sports program consultant for the Barr Foundation (Boston) and was instrumental in developing several youth sports initiatives in Boston and Northampton. He has published widely in the areas of sport psychology, motor learning, exercise physiology, sport sociology, computing, and professional aspects of sport and physical education.
Intrator has a Ph.D. from Stanford University. He became a professor of Education and Child Study at Smith in 1999 after more than a decade of teaching and administrative service in public schools in New York, Vermont, and California. Over the years he has coached high school and youth sports. He founded the Smith College Urban Education Initiative—an educational outreach program that engages students in intensive service-learning experience by placing them
in urban school settings during their winter term. The author of four books, including Tuned in
and Fired, which was a finalist for the Grawemeyer Award in Education, Intrator has been
awarded a Kellogg National Leadership Fellowship and an Ella Baker Fellowship.
Kym Kendall is a physical education teacher at Gerena Community School where she has taught for five years. She is a graduate of Florida International University. She played Division I soccer and played for the United States Olympic Development Team. In addition to teaching, she has coached numerous sports and age groups.
Andrew Wood and Kanaie Haneishi are Graduate Student Supervisors for Project Coach, positions they also held in the 2005-06 school year. Wood has a B.A. from Durham University in the UK where he captained the university rugby team. He is enrolled in the M.A.T. secondary
education program for history at Smith College and is the head coach of Smith’s rugby club. In addition to writing and delivering curriculum for Project Coach, he is student-teaching at a public high school in Northampton, MA.
Haneishi has a B.A. from Juntendo Univeristy in Japan and an M.S. in Exercise Science in Exercise Physiology from the University of Memphis. She is currently working on an M.S. in Exercise and Sport Studies in coaching at Smith College. She is the assistant soccer coach at Smith and the head coach for the Western United U-18 Girl team in MA.
