When I was a young, inexperienced ski coach, fresh off the professional freestyle skiing circuit, I did a terrible thing—I let a young person down. Twenty-five years later, what I did still pains me.It was my rookie season and among the rules I had laid out for the skiers was that if theyhoped to ski in the state finals at the end of the season, they must come to practice every day and stay out of trouble. When the finals rolled around I was focused solely on fielding the fastest team possible. Naturally, I entered my six fastest racers. One of these, however, was a girl with a chronically bad attitude, a girl who had gotten in trouble for smoking and skipping school, and who had missed many practices. But I put her on my roster anyway, and in doing so, left at home a sophomore racer who had been a model team member. As it turned out, the girl who had been in so much trouble missed a gate and was disqualified from the race. But that was the least of my problems. I discovered the depth of my misjudgment at the end-of-season banquet when the exemplary sophomore skier I’d left behind cornered me and let me have it. She said that until the finals she had looked up to me and had seen me as a role model. She said that she couldn’t understand why I brought the other girl—the one who had broken so many of our team’s rules—to the event. And then she said she would never ski for me again. I was devastated. In trying to do a good job as a coach, I had hurt a great kid. This incident has stayed with me vividly through the years. The lessons learned from the experience, both hers and mine, have remained a constant reminder of the potential of sports to teach both for both good and ill. It still troubles me that my young racer learned that for many people winning is the only thing that matters, that rules of behavior, good sportsmanship, perseverance and being a contributing and supportive member of a team fly out the window when winning is involved. I learned the power of being a role model and how my actions can have an enormous impact on how our youth learn values such as respect, responsibility and teamwork. And how they can just as easily learn the opposite.

This confrontation at a private boarding school in Maine marked a turning point in my life, and became, in essence, the jumping-off point for my personal and professional journey into the field of child development and sports. As a young educator, I was struck by the influence I had on my students especially in the after school hours.

I soon learned that in many cases I was teaching my young students more about life on the playing fields than I was in the classroom. In 1983 I headed to Harvard’s Graduate School of Education to explore my newly formed passion. In 1984 I co-founded the NewSport Experience Camp for boys in Kents Hill, Maine as a laboratory to test out ideas. In 1990 I co-founded Sports PLUS, a coed summer day camp at Milton Academy in Milton, Ma. At this time, I was a Teaching Fellow for Robert Coles at Harvard. The course was called Social Reflections of Literature where we read The Great Books and used these stories as a medium for moral discussions. It was this point, that I realized the potential value of connecting young children’s interest in sports to learning about the values of their role models. In the summer of 1990, we introduced sports literature into the overall PLUS camp curriculum. With their coach as a teacher and role model the children read and discussed sports related topics. In essence, this was the birth of what is now called the GoodSport After School Program.

In the early nineties, I began to develop the curriculum we used at the Milton Sports PLUS summer camp in an effort to create an after school program.In 1994, we piloted an after school program at a Boston elementary school. In 1997 in an effort to expand the program, GoodSport was introduced at an urban YMCA in Lawrence, Massachusetts with the help of AmeriCorps service members and the city library. As a recreational and community center, the YMCA offered a new and promising setting in which to expand and evaluate the program. Over the past five years, the curriculum has been piloted, revamped and fine-tuned into what is now called the GoodSport Out-of-School Program.

The ultimate goal of the GoodSport Out-of-School program is to provide children with the opportunity to have fun, learn about themselves and others and develop into good people.
Dr. Jeffrey P. Beedy, Ed.D ´
Founder

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