Coaching and Football
From Player to Coach - From Student to Teacher I began playing football when I was in grade 9 for my local Bantam team the Bulldogs. Until that point, I had been active in team sports but it wasn't until playing football that I truly understood the value of learning to play as part of a team - something I have come to understand as one of the most important lessons one can learn. As my skill increased, so did my passion and love for football, and with that came a deeper appreciation for the skills, character development, and values football instils in a young man's heart and mind: commitment and dedication, the pursuit of excellence through practice and evaluation, perseverance, and having fun. Following my graduation
from Dr. E.P. Scarlett High School in June of 2003 I soon found that my passion and love of football could not be fulfilled by playing alone, and so I began coaching for Scarlett the following Fall. I began as the Defensive Line positional coach for the Junior Varsity team and remained in that role until 2006 when we won our first City Championship in 15 years. In 2007 I moved on to coach the Offensive Line and Special Teams on the Senior Varsity team until the end of the 2009 season. In my 7 years of coaching at Scarlett I continued to learn and appreciate the character and values football builds, but most importantly I began to realize my role as a coach in developing these traits in my players. Though I didn't resume coaching football until 2011 during my second year placement at James Fowler, it was always on my mind. This was especially true as I began to understand both the theoretical and practical knowledge of teaching and learning. The parallels between coaching and teaching were increasingly obvious, and as I conducted by biography of learning I began to realize that as a coach I was teacher, and more so that the teacher within me had existed long before I entered the MT Program. Coming to this realization, along with the foundation for relationship building I had developed in my previous years of coaching and through my summer with the Boys and Girls Clubs of Calgary's SASS Program (Stoked About Staying in School) allowed me to approach coaching at Fowler as an exercise in evaluating both the way in which I coach and how the relationships I develop on the field translate into the classroom. As a blended football program (Junior and Senior players on the same team) I was fortunate to have players I coached in both my 10-2 and 30-2 social studies classes. Collectively, my experience coaching at Fowler was an affirmation of one of my fundamental teaching philosophies; That the values of developing strong, meaningful, and positive personal relationships translates into a learning environment in which students feel comfortable to take risks, are confident to ask questions which enable them to explore concepts at deeper level, and enjoy coming to class to learn. |