The most important activity that helped refine my view of character education was not taking classes on epistemology and ethics from Dallas Willard. Nor was it taking all my other Ph.D. classes that addressed virtue or moral development. It was coaching youth league sports. Granted, readings in philosophy, ethics, and theology led me to recognize that the things I had learned in those classes gained fresh meaning by coaching youth sports.
First, I realized I had to deal with my own issues. I can be very competitive, and I wanted to guard against passing that intensity on to my boys. What I soon realized, however, was that the “Let’s just have fun, rah, rah” approach I took to coaching is a horrible approach. It leads one to be too wishy-washy about teaching the knowledge and skills that lead to excellence. We need to deal with our own sin first, so that we can then focus on excellence (2 Peter 2:1-6).
Second, I realized I needed to focus less on resisting my issues and more on the proper end or telos of the practice I am coaching. Children implicitly understand excellence and purpose better than most graduate-educated adults. They know the end of the practice. Even if the youth league does not keep score, your kids are keeping score since they quickly learn what excellence is. Thus, I soon realized my job was not simply to provide an enjoyable, positive experience (the wrong telos). It was to help them become excellent at the sport. In fact, you are not helping the players flourish if you are not helping them become excellent.
The same is true with any endeavor. In this way, sports also remind you to avoid the major mistakes of the academy. Too often, academics think that the end of their work is to teach critical thinking. It is not. The end of our teaching is to help students attain excellence. Critical thinking is only a means to that end. The educational philosopher George Counts made this point,
There is the fallacy that the great object of education is to produce the college professor, that is, the individual who adopts an agnostic attitude towards every important social issue, who can balance the pros against the cons with the skill of a juggler, who sees all sides of every question and never commits himself to any, who delays action until all the facts are in, who knows that all the facts will never come in, who consequently holds his judgment in a state of indefinite suspension, and who before the approach of middle age sees his powers of action atrophy and his social sympathies decay…..although college professors, if not too numerous, perform a valuable social function, society needs great numbers of persons who…are at the same time able to think in terms of life, make decisions and act. From such persons will come our real social leaders.1
In athletics, the young player does not simply need to know all the possible approaches to excellence one can take and then learn how to think critically about them, although that can be a helpful skill. They need to gain the ability to discern the best approach, refine it, and improve upon it. Certainly, the coach needs to know the various options to be able to understand how best to instruct the player. Still, knowing all the options is never the telos, even for the best coach.
Third, one key job of the coach is to motivate those who lack motivation. Like most important things in life, having fun is not the best motivation (it’s usually a by-product of success). Thus, I had to place the game in a larger story that might shape young kids’ affections toward the sport. You need to catch them up in a larger drama. This is where stories, books, movies, and the first-hand experience of entering a college, minor, or major league baseball game are important. They need to experience the high-level drama taking place at a visceral level.
Fourth, beyond motivation, coaches must teach the technical skills needed to acquire second-nature habits, so they become automatic, much like virtue education. There is no such thing as a natural (contrary to the baseball movie title). Of course, as with much virtue education, too many Little League coaches act like these things are taught cognitively and end up talking way, way too much (especially to younger boys). It is like the small group that reads the books by Richard Foster or Dallas Willard on spiritual disciplines and discusses them, but does not practice the disciplines. Or the small group that reads about serving the needy but never engages in service. They need to engage them in practice right away, so they can understand why a coach may suggest a particular technique and then see success when that technique is applied.
What matters is getting kids to practice so they form the second-nature habits (i.e., an ingredient of what we call virtues) necessary for the sport. Hitting and throwing a ball is not something that comes naturally. It is a learned skill that is acquired by what scholars call deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is not simply repetition. It requires several important elements.
Deliberate practice requires that you challenge your team (or your students). You do not simply try to repeat something. You try to repeat something difficult successfully (e.g., make 300 three-point shots a day from multiple angles). The same should prove true for academics. Yet, academics are often not as rigorous as athletic coaches (e.g., grade inflation). In this regard, many college professors must remember what the educational philosopher Isaac Kandel said, “There is one part of our educational system, secondary and higher, in which there is no compromise with standards, in which there is rigid selection both of instructors and students, in which there is no soft pedagogy, and in which training and sacrifice of the individual for common ends are accepted without question. I refer, of course, to the organization of athletics.”2
Deliberate practice also requires specific feedback from a coach. After all, one could use the wrong technique when attempting the practice. I remember reading about a study of John Wooden, the Christian college basketball coach who led UCLA to ten national championships.3 The authors of the study wanted to learn what Wooden did in practice. Of course, he did not yell, but he also did not offer much encouragement. Encouragement was only 7% of his verbal talk at practice. Instead, 63% of his coaching involved specific technical instruction. Not surprisingly, this kind of instruction from a mentor is one of the keys to excellence.4 Thus, it is usually best to leave praise to the parents. When you teach for excellence, you must provide specific feedback.
Yet, the coach is not enough. You need the whole community to help you. I saw success with getting kids not to strike out, etc., but they needed their parents or siblings to practice with them. If they didn’t, they improved enough not to embarrass themselves, but they did not improve as much as they could to reach higher stages of excellence. Here, other practices matter too.
Marriage matters for certain little league sports that require more technical development from the start (think baseball, golf, and tennis versus soccer or basketball), especially for boys (see for example here). That’s why kids of single parents are at a major disadvantage. As Melissa S. Kearney titled one of her chapters in her book, Two Parent Privilege, “2>1.” Of course, the same would be true with busy parents or those kids without siblings who play with them. If there is insufficient communal investment in practice, the children do not become excellent at a particular practice.
Finally, you recognize that wisdom is the hardest part to teach. I had grown up playing baseball since the age of five, so I did not realize that I had decades of baseball knowledge that I now had to transfer to young children. These are unwritten generalities, which is what wisdom is, known only by those who have achieved a certain level of success by demonstrating the virtues consistently over time.
Also, having this wisdom helps with your imagination. You read lots about imagination these days, but the best imagination comes from being an expert practitioner and then realizing how you can improve performance with some creativity. I remember the first game, coaching my oldest son in soccer. We were playing with small goals and no goalies, and my co-coach and I quickly realized after two quick goals on our team by the opposing team’s star player that we needed to innovate, considering these new rules. We needed a sweeper who could stop breakaways (our players would not have figured this out on their own). The sweeper soon became the key position that all the kids wanted to play (unfortunately, even our best attackers). Our years playing soccer helped us know how to innovate.
In the end, those who are motivated to do so, they then adopt the identity. This process usually happens during the teenage years. One starts to consider oneself a baseball or tennis player. In academics, one starts to think of one’s self as a mathematician or a writer.5 In ethics, the technical term we use is that a person develops a moral identity.6A person reaches the point where he or she instinctively and reflexively thinks, loves, and acts morally. For Christians, it means becoming who we are designed to be—image bearers of the triune God and fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.
For more on how to build character education programs in a higher education context, see Cultivating Character: A Toolkit for Assessing Virtues in College Students.
Footnotes
- Isaac L. Kandel, The Dilemma of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), 71-72.
- Isaac L. Kandel, The Dilemma of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), 71-72.
- Gallimore, Ronald, and Roland Tharp, “What a Coach Can Teach a Teacher, 1975-2004: Reflections and Reanalysis of John Wooden’s Teaching Practices,” The Sport Psychologist 18, no. 2 (2004): 119–37, https://doi.org/10.1123/tsp.18.2.119.
- Ericsson and Pool, Peak.
- Perry L. Glanzer, Identity Excellence: A Theory of Moral Expertise for Higher Education (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022).
