The Intersection: Where Sports and Social Work Meet

 Ok, welcome back to this three-part series on identifying issues facing college student-athletes and coaches today.  This post is going to focus on what we can do to not only help our student-athletes but also to help ourselves in working with this population.   Photo by Steven Lelham on Unsplash The very first thing we need to do as coaches is determine where WE are, and what we want OUR goals to be.  That can look several different ways.   When's the last time you looked at your coaching philosophy?  Are you still working in ways that demonstrate your philosophy?  Look at that and decide who YOU want to be as a coach, and then work backward from there.  (I love working on philosophies!  Let me know if you want to work on this together!)  This is something you should look at at the beginning and end of each season.  At the beginning, you ask yourself, "Is this still what I want to do?  Are these the most important ...

If you're new here, please read the first part of this post before this one --  it's called Recent Conversations and was posted on 2/24/24, and focuses on how today's college students and student-athletes are different from previous generations. I shared that post on my Facebook and LinkedIn pages (thanks to those who shared!) and engaged in some great discussions with many different types of people (thanks for commenting!).  College professors, parents, teachers, social workers, college coaches, high school coaches, and former athletes reached out to me in various ways to discuss these recent conversations I've been having, and they offered some great feedback and observations.  So first, let's discuss those: Decrease in critical thinking in K-12 classrooms A former college classmate mentioned this one -- and, I have to agree that our national education system over the past 20 years has focused more on test-taking than it has on critical thinking skills.  I've ...

Social Work.  That age-old profession of nosy white women taking kids away from families.  Right?  RIGHT?  No, in fact; that's not what social work is all about.   Social Work as a formal profession has been around for decades and informally has been around for millennia.  It started formally late in the 19th Century to help vulnerable people, like immigrants, escape poverty.  Since then, it has become a full-fledged professional career and helping profession with more than just poverty on the mind.  The core values of social work include social justice, promoting the dignity and worth of people, the importance of human relationships, competence, service, and integrity (in no particular order).  Informal social work still exists in our world today-- think of people in communities who work to help those in need or churches that host soup kitchens.  But as a profession, social work has a definite mission, which is "to enhance human we...