The Technical Area- What can the school and professional environment learn from each other?

The Technical Area- Match report summary

What can the school environment learn from the professional environment, and what can the professional environment learn from the school environment?

?Introduction of why? I have always been intrigued by the difference and similarities between the school and professional sporting environments and the teams that exist within each, and to discover how each environment can learn more from one another.

This intrigue resulted in me asking myself several questions:

If only a small percentage of school athletes progress to the professional environment, can the school environment still learn anything from the professional environment? How do we better prepare those school athletes who will progress to the professional environment? What is the school environment’s main objective with student-athletes? Does the professional environment know of these objectives? Does the professional environment know the journey the student-athletes has been on and is on during their life? All these questions and more.

So, to learn more about this topic, I invited eight people for dinner and discussed what the professional and school environment could learn from one another. The dinner team consisted of players with various skill sets, experience, and knowledge in playing, coaching, teaching, treating, and challenging.

What was evident from the evening is that the more we share, the more we can get better in each environment. Ultimately, we are dealing with someone’s life journey, and these two environments are both parts of that journey. The challenge is to form an alignment, but first, forming trust across the environments is fundamental. Trust is acknowledging that both environments are experts during a specific time frame of an athlete's journey, and sharing more about the challenges and goals in these environments will ultimately lead to a better sportsperson and a better person, surely?

While the challenge is to align, one must understand that competition is getting stronger, especially in some school sports, and through competition, we get better. The question posed at the dinner was how do we define competition in these environments? Once it’s clearly defined, we can understand what aspects are required to support, teach, coach, and mentor the athlete. It’s important to highlight that in South Africa, school sport is popular and sometimes bigger at a school level than afterwards. So here is another question to think about… What are each sport's objectives within the school environment and those after school within the same sporting code?

The match report of The Technical Area is below but before we get there, let’s take a half time to pause and ask the question, how do we form that alignment? That trust? It was evident that the evening showed the benefits of sharing amongst those who work in professional environments and those in school environments. As an outcome, this should be carried out more to improve the environment within schools and the professional system because, ultimately, we are dealing with the same person as mentioned.

While a lot has been discussed about those who do progress to the professional environment after school, there is more to discover on how those who aren’t looking to take that next step can still learn lessons from the workings of the professional environment.

While writing this match report, I was busy reading The Coach’s Guide to Teaching by Doug Lemov and came across the below points on page 212, which relate to what we are trying to achieve with athletes.

In the end, what matters most about the work that coaches do? We set out to help people achieve their athletic dreams, to maximize their potential and find out what it means to pursue excellence and to learn to work together as a group. For most, the journey itself will turn out to have been the gift. Playing will end!

No matter. They will go on to other (hopefully greater) things, our athletes. They will be husbands and wives and partners, mothers and fathers, doctors, nurses, teachers and coaches and everything else.

Would we coach differently if we knew that was the true outcome?

Below is the match report from the dinner:

What can the school environment learn from the professional environment?

·???????Change: School systems are notoriously slow at change and/or improvement, yet they are the systems developing the future, and the future is always changing. This should, therefore, be something considered in education and discussed further.

·???????Learning from different sporting environments: Different sporting codes often engage amongst themselves to learn and grow. Can schools learn from different school’s models or institutes?

·???????Get someone better: It is common practice for a great coach to bring someone else into their coaching team who is better / has a different approach to them to learn and grow from.

·???????Stakeholder management: Professional teams are required to carry out stakeholder management consistently. A topic that was raised on the evening was educating parents. Parents are key stakeholders in a student’s environment, but is this getting done at schools?

·???????Educational assistance/professional development: The professional environment consistently seeks assistance to develop, grow, and improve. The school environment is getting more challenging, teachers and coaches are under more and more pressure and therefore, how can schools bring in greater assistance to allow their structures and employees to grow?

·???????The culture around curiosity: There is often a deep culture of curiosity in a professional environment from all involved, including management, players, and coaches. How can we develop this culture of curiosity in schools? And what impact could this have?

?What can the professional environment learn from the school environment?

·???????Belonging = performance: School systems form a belonging, a family, and you will often hear past students speak about their time at school or a specific team they played in during their time at school. When one feels they belong, they perform, feel comfortable enough to express themselves, and their true character emerges. ?

·???????Safety: Coaches and players feel vulnerable with short contracts, whereas schools create safety through their structures. Safety allows for expression, freedom, and ultimately a greater likelihood to perform.

·???????Development: School systems play a role in various stages of a child’s development and growth. Furthermore, teachers are tasked with multiple roles; for example, you will have a teacher who coaches/managers and is a house director, and within those roles, they bring a wealth of different skills to understand the students development.

·???????Journey: Students are on a life journey during their high school years, with a lot of development and change occurring. This journey should always be remembered after school when moving into the student’s professional life. The question of “what is a professional athlete's journey?” often gets forgotten.

·???????Support: Call even when things are going well- connection before correction. School systems have various support roles which allow students to flourish in different areas (academics, music, sport) and hopefully removes the pressure to achieve in one area all the time.

·???????Value of sport: In most schools the value of sport is a key focus, the focus of learning to work with a group, learning to lead/captain a team or follow your leader/captain, learning to work hard to achieve your athletic potential. Lessons that are part of student's development and growth, sport is powerful!

The Technical Area- Match 1 Team sheet.

1.?????AC Blume

2.?????Stephen Cook

3.?????Tom Dawson-Squibb

4.?????Chris Ekron

5.?????Robbie Fleck

6.?????Nick Groom

7.?????Alex Hall

8.?????Sandhya Silal

9.?????Duncan Wood?