Excellence in team sport - a lesson from the playing fields?
We are grateful to Sean Hamill (School House 81-83) for this article. He is now on the staff at Moffats - a prep school near Kidderminster. Besides teaching geography and English, he runs the senior cricket and hockey teams, and is a registered Hockey Association coach.)
Something of Value
If a man does away with his traditional way of living and throws
away his good customs, he had better first make certain that he has
something of value to replace them.
(Basuto Proverb, quoted as the
title of a book about the coming of Independence to Kenya)
The pursuit of excellence in team sports needs a team effort from the school - and increasingly this is being hampered by the sheer variety of individual sports now being offered. The drift from competitive team sports is seen more in the government sector than in public schools - but even in the fee paying sector there are schools stepping up leisure pursuit options at the expense of established sports. This is of concern because whilst the individual benefits, vital lessons of teamwork are being lost.
Competitiveness and team sports are, at last, swinging back into favour within the education establishment, but there are a great number who still regard them as a prejudice against the non-athletic. These people continue to miss the point. The first maxim of any coach is that the sport must be enjoyable; if it is not, then it is the coach, not the sport which is to blame. Simply increasing the number of pursuits available in school sports is little more than a neat public relations side-step; it fails the children because it blurs the focus of a proper in-depth approach. This surely only dilutes the invaluable lesson that children can learn from team sports - namely the generous and selfless support of others.
And these are disciplines which are as relevant to the school choir as they are to the rugby XV, and as vital to those who may want to go on at some later date to learn more individualistic sports such as rock climbing or kayaking, as they are to members of a rowing eight. If preparation and the structured approach are watchwords for excellence in sport and life, then the lesson was sorely learned in the Lyme Bay kayaking tragedy.
Telling people about teamwork and safety in individual pursuits does not actually show a person what it is really like - the lesson becomes . . . well a lesson, and we all know how many of those people sit through in their school life. Once sport becomes deconstructed and without real goals it becomes like the American vision for the stressed executive; the gym culture this has created is beneficial insofar as it goes but it only caters for the individual needs of the body - the stimulation of endorphins and increased blood supply to the brain may well improve Mr Directors sense of well being but will do little for his ability to work effectively amongst a group of people.
Individuals need the experience of working together if they are to derive that special inspiration which comes form achieving under pressure and, crucially, the experience of failing together. Team sport provides this, day in, day out in a unique and highly diverse way; it is, effectively, a licence to push to the limits and beyond; nowhere is this lesson of treating triumph and disaster just the same, more valuable than intertwined with the learning process in the school environment.
A single taste of excellence is often enough to motivate a person for the rest of his or her life - a benchmark is realised against which everything else can be measured. But the winners are not only those whose cabinets are full of silverware; if the preparation is of quality, people will instinctively know what they have been able to achieve, whatever their results. Some may misguidedly regard achievements in sports as heights they will never reach again - a type of introspective nostalgia which is damaging to any person; but most (and the role of the coach is vital here) will avoid this pitfall, and be able to view their achievements as an exemplar, the tough criteria of which were addressed and met at some point and which now hold true for any further challenge.
In sport, those who participate and think long and hard about the way they do so, use the term professionalism in a different way to those who see it merely a label for those who accept money to play sport. A professional approach is synonymous with the approach of the highest discipline; where a sportsman or woman focuses to the limit of their talent and commitment in an effort to realise the potential of themselves and their team. And so it should be in everyday life; the discipline taught to people outside the classroom provides a key to unlock the potential of those who may not shine academically.
These are common enough ideas. Yet their universality is never emphasised in a way that makes them a realistic contributor to the workings of society outside sport. The Army is a prime example of the best use of cross-curricula applications of excellence. In an environment where good team work can mean the difference between life and death, reliance upon one another is re-tested and challenged in every conceivable way from team sports to the mid-Winter stopovers on Dartmoor; from full scale military exercises to sessions on the obstacle course. So excellence in team sports provides us with an enduring example for life. The Army recognises this, but why leave it to the Army? Society is a team. We have long since evolved from selfish concepts of survival and as such are dependent on others for the vast majority of our needs; our individual specialisation is so complete that our ability to work together must be our main priority. I was in School House for two years (81-83). As a late entrant I decided against rowing, but there was no escaping it - either you turned the other way or you became totally enthused. Living with five first eight oarsmen provided the extreme test and I revelled in the world of commitment and excellence on offer in the structured environment of the boat club, where every members contribution - large or small - went into performances on race days; and where an exhausted captain of boats would burn the midnight oil writing up the rowing diary while the rest of the crew were beginning to sleep off a gruelling late evening fitness session.
I went on to Exeter University where our hockey team won the University Athletic Union first team title three years consecutively in the mid 1980s. In the 1986/7 season on the back of an unprecedented league season (Isca beat us to the South West premier league title on goal difference) we again won the UAU title. On the subs bench for the semi-final and final, I was re-introduced to the world of excellence in team sport I had first seen in the boat club at Monkton. The preparation was meticulous: bed times, practice times, relaxation times; what to eat, what to think, what to do. Here was the beer swilling social club of the university going to bed at 9:30 after a bit of a team talk and a mug of cocoa. With such preparation it seemed inconceivable that we could lose and we did not. These are enduring lessons and it is simply not true that what is learned in this environment are the outmoded flickerings of traditional sports. Any sport must evolve, as technology and society inevitably evolve, but to dismantle old sporting systems and flood schools with disparate leisure pursuits leaves fewer areas of common ground, fewer opportunities for people to share the experience of sport (as players and supporters), and little chance to play to a level which may lay radical foundations for the way in which people conduct their lives. School should be as much an education for life as it is for academic achievement. The right blend of structured team sport will reward a school with achievers of much wider capabilities, people far more likely to ply a successful course in a world of increasingly fluid opportunities, and able once again to win battles far removed from the playing fields of Eton.