Many young athletes feel pressured to choose between school and sport. This is a false choice. We want every athlete to have the opportunity to excel at both academics and athletics.
Young athletes are people first. They shouldn’t feel pulled between their parents, teachers, and coaches. When uncoordinated, the scheduling alone can be overwhelming and frustrating for everyone involved. Athlete Centered Learning encompasses several key principles: life skill development, uniqueness, self-awareness, creativity, athlete safety, and a holistic perspective.
Athlete Centered Learning is composed of passionate educators, coaches, and other practitioners who believe all athletes have the right to a world class education that integrates with their athletic training. To accomplish this, we facilitate a working relationship between teachers, parents, and athletes that is positive, effective, and reciprocal. We advocate learner centered principles which not only have gained powerful traction in academic and sport science research, but are also vital skills individuals must develop to thrive in the 21st century workspace.
Individual sport athletes in figure skating, equestrian, skiing, fencing, and others must learn how to train and excel in their chosen sport while being constrained by the traditional, antiquated, high school education model. In contrast to traditional team sports such as football or basketball where practices and games are incorporated into high school life and even promoted by the school, individual sport athletes have unique challenges due to varying competitive seasons, training schedules, and other obligations which may not align well with the traditional school year. Even elite athletes in traditional high school sports from football to swimming can find the rigid demands of traditional schooling in conflict with their athletic pursuits.
The American education system is at the dawn of understanding the impact of individualized learning, mastery based approaches, hybrid instructional models, and other effective and flexible learning options. We promote modern pedagogues and educational models which enable athlete centered learning principles. Additionally, there are many parallels between the athlete centered coaching movement, patient centered care, and related new thinking in other fields to our own interests in Athlete Centered Learning.
Our ultimate goal is to build a brick and mortar school that brings together numerous individual sports into a single place and implements a modern, flexible, individualized model to ensure these athletes receive a high quality education that prepares them for the jobs of the future. This is digitally literate, socially adept, media savvy, creatively skilled, and technologically fluent.
Until then, we are working to help parents, educators, athletes, and coaches ensure everyone is fairly accommodated within the traditional academic structure.
Athlete Centered Learning 