On the Need for Equal Opportunity
The ‘C’ Average and the Debate Over True Education
Exclusive to Freedom
By Reggie Berry
June 27, 2008 — Dr. William Butler Yeats, one of the greatest poets in the English language and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote, “Someone once said that the best taught subject in the American high school is football. Not only are the players given theory, they are also given hours of practice in that theory.”
Yeats continued, “For what advanced English class is the incumbent willing to go without sweets, refuse tobacco and limit his social life in order to sleep his eight to ten hours? For what advanced biology is he willing to plow through sleet and roll in the mud and risk breaking legs and arms and nose and neck in order to perfect his skill and to achieve success? For what advanced algebra is he willing to memorize signals and to learn plays as complicated and elegant as musical ornamentations in a Chopin prelude?”
I think Yeats states clearly what many educators today refuse to see. If education is about the acquisition of knowledge, why are we stopping some kids from acquiring it by requiring — as the California Interscholastic Federation now does and as many school districts around the country also do — that they maintain a “C” average?
Take a look at what is learned from sports.
1. To Be On Time
When I played football the coaches always forced us to be 15 minutes early for every event. They called that “Vince Lombardi time.”
2. To Show Up
You can’t learn if you’re not there. Some coaches say that half the battle is showing up. Playing sports gives the child a reason to come to school. It is commonly known that if he is interested in something else in school besides school, he will come to school. If I didn’t go to school, I knew I couldn’t go to practice. If I didn’t go to practice, I wouldn’t be able to play in the game.
3. Cooperative Learning Skills
You acquire cooperative learning skills by working in groups with your teammates to reach a common goal: winning the game. The coach knows the importance of education and most likely your teammates will as well. If you come from foster care, if your father or mother are institutionalized, if you’re the children of migrant workers and, in many cases today, if you come from a broken home, you have to be extraordinary to see the importance of education. We punish children for who their parents are or for having no parents at all if we deny them the right to participate in sports.
4. Listening Skills
You learn the very important skill of listening: If you don’t pay attention to the coach, how do you learn your position? How do you learn plays? In football you learn to listen for audibles, which is a changing of the plays. You have to listen to your coach and teammates.
5. Discipline
Discipline, as defined by basketball coach Bobby Knight, is: Do what has to be done, when it has to be done, as well as it can be done, and do it that way all the time. Can you imagine applying this to schoolwork? Sports ingrain this type of philosophy.
6. Respect
“To treat others the way you want to be treated or to treat others the way they want to be treated.” Without mutual respect for your coach and teammates, you cannot win the game, but you also learn to respect your opponents as well. You learn how to give respect and to accept being respected.
7. Statistics
If you play baseball you learn statistics and how to figure out your batting average. In basketball you learn how to figure out your free-throw percentage, and in football, you learn how many times a team runs certain plays. There are many other examples.
8. Overcoming Obstacles
Through sports activities you learn to overcome obstacles and to endure, because if you don’t quit, there’s a wonderful prize at the end of your challenge.
9. Leadership Skills
Athletes have gone on to hold positions of responsibility as diverse as heads of corporations, presidents of our country, college presidents, and Supreme Court justices.
10. Health and Nutrition
When you play sports you push your body so far that you can tell how everything you eat affects your body and how it hinders or helps your body to perform. While playing with the San Diego Chargers, we usually got Mondays off. Bob Brown, the big defensive tackle, would barbecue pork chops and pork ribs for the team. They were delectable! I had to stop going to Big Bob’s because the pork would stay in my system and make me extremely tired and it wouldn’t leave my system until Saturday. I knew what vitamins to take and what each vitamin was for. I learned about injuries and how to treat them, not just because I received them but because of the injuries that my brothers or my teammates received.
11. Meeting People From All Over the World
You have the opportunity to meet people from all over the world who have many occupations. Years ago, the center for the Chargers was Carl Mauk. Some players used to make fun of him because he was so conservative. In fact, they called him the “old hard hat.” I used to think that all conservatives were bigots until I met Carl. I learned he was the kindest gentleman on the team. One time I told him that I thought all conservatives were racist until I met him. He picked me up and gave me a big hug. Your world opens up when you’re an athlete because of the people you are exposed to.
In a 1945 speech, Pope Pius XII said, “Sports, properly directed, develops character, makes a man courageous, a generous loser, and a gracious victor: it refines the senses, gives intellectual penetration, and steels the will to endurance. It is not merely a physical development then. Sport, rightly understood, is an occupation of the whole man, and while perfecting the body as an instrument of the mind, it also makes the mind itself a more defined instrument for the search and communication of truth and helps man to achieve that end to which all others must be subservient, the service and praise of his Creator.”
Taking Away the Right to Learn
If all these things about sports are true — and we know that they are — then why are we telling our young men and women who come from dysfunctional homes that if they don’t meet a certain teacher’s needs or criteria, they are not allowed to learn any other way? They are prevented from learning the valuable lessons that sports can teach them. They are shut out from the benefits described above.
We know that different learning styles exist for different people. But we tell our students they have no right to learn unless they learn things the way the non-athlete learns.
In the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, journalist Makebra Anderson quoted researchers at Yale University who said that African-American children in kindergarten were twice as likely to be expelled as Hispanic and white children, and more than five times as likely to be expelled as Asian children. According to the study, state expulsion rates for pre-kindergartners exceed those in K-12 classes. Thus, these students fall behind at a very early age, injuring their readiness and hindering their path toward continued education. Participation in sports helps to catch them up emotionally and gives them the opportunity to say “I can.”
There used to be a time when students from broken homes or students with learning problems could join the armed forces. No more. The alternative now is jail. We have 2.3 million people in American jails and prisons and the numbers keep growing.
These numbers raise important questions - questions I ask educators and caretakers of our youth. For example, is it proper to tell young men and women with learning problems that they have no right to participate in our world unless they learn the way we want them to learn? Is it right to tell them that if they don’t learn English, math and science the way we teach it, they have to quit school — and the alternative is jail?
Those promoting the “C” average requirement feel that sports is not education.
“I’m tired of your language and how you speak, Berry” Hall of Fame player and San Diego Charger defensive coach Willie Wood once hollered at me. “One of these days you’re going to be speaking before a large crowd of people and they will laugh at your diction,” Willie said. “If you’re going to come around me, speak the King’s English.”
From then on, I did. That is the influence a coach can have on a young man.
It seems that we have forgotten why sports programs were created in schools in the first place. It’s strange now to hear our leaders say that we need after-school programs. What do they and the educators think football, baseball, track, basketball, soccer, volleyball, tennis, swimming, gymnastics, golf and so forth are? They’re after-school programs, of course.
A conscientious sports coach can reach and inspire a troubled young man, encouraging him to succeed in life even after his classroom teachers have failed to do so. I have seen it happen, time and again.
The attitude that it is all right to ban students from sports based on having a certain grade average denies equal opportunity and borders on institutional racism. The students in large part that we are talking about are Black, Hispanic or poor Whites — the same people who over-occupy our jails and prisons.
Reggie Berry founded the Goals for Life Program in 1989 and has been the program’s executive director since its inception. Under Goals for Life, former National Football League (NFL) players work with at-risk children and teens in schools and juvenile facilities. See www.goalsforlife.net for more information.
A former defensive back for the San Diego Chargers and the Denver Broncos, Berry is president of the NFL Retired Players of Los Angeles County and was recently elected to the National Steering Committee of the NFL Retired Players Association. Active in many aspects of community life and improvement, he sits on the board of directors of the Aquatic Foundation of Metropolitan Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Centers for Alcohol and Drug Abuse, and the Scholars Learning Academy, and on the board of trustees of Coast Plaza Doctors Hospital.
In 1998, he received the Southern California Inter-Scholastic Federation’s John Wooden Award, presented by legendary basketball coach John Wooden, and Freedom Magazine’s Human Rights Leadership Award, presented at the National Press Club in Washington - both honors in recognition of his work with and dedication to at-risk youth. In 2005, Goals for Life received the Charity of the Year Award from Sports Mavericks. The following year, Berry was given the Aquatic Foundation of Metropolitan Los Angeles’ Inspiration Award for his work with children through Goals for Life. In 2007, he received the Teachers Making a Difference Award.
