Galloway,+Chris+Inclusion+Strategies+in+Sports+Coaching



I have felt at times that I’m a bit of a professional student. I have a BA from Oregon State University in Liberal Studies emphasis in History and Political Science, and a BS from Southern Oregon University in Athletic Training. I am currently half way through the Masters of Teaching program at Southern Oregon University. My goals are to be a wildly successful, and beloved by all, science teacher at the high school level. I also plan to pursue an endorsement in Phys. Ed. and would love to get into coaching as well. My dream and my hope is to teach full time during the school year and to travel during the summers. Or fish. Not the sport kind but the commercial kind. Speaking of…

A few years before starting the MAT program I did commercial fishing on a seine fishing boat in Alaska. It was a job I had pursued for a few years before finally getting and it was totally worth the wait and the effort. Your office is the extraordinarily beautiful bays and inlets of the Alaskan coast and you are literally catching your paycheck. OK, maybe not literally, but pretty close. It is also the perfect job for a teacher because the fishing happens during the summer when school is out. It's a bit stressful but a very rewarding job, a lot like teaching. Both can have their share of stress but are both incredibly rewarding in their own separate ways.

Now that I’ve just waxed poetic, at least as poetic as I get, about fishing I need to backtrack just a bit and give you the one big drawback, for me at least, of fishing all summer. During the summer I Mountain Bike. Yep capital letters. That’s me and my nephew, at the top of the page, getting ready to ride from the parking lot of Mt. Ashland down into Lithia Park, (you can’t completely see my bike but it’s a sweet full-suspension Specialized Enduro with a brand new Fox Dhx air 5.0) which I HIGHLY recommend. This particular day we didn't earn our downhill by climbing all the way to the ski area but most of the time that's the way I do it. Anyway, I really love to mountain bike and in my normal neck of the woods, which is Klamath Falls Oregon, the mountain bike season is fairly small and summer is the best time. So …. fishing or biking, biking or fishing? A tough question and one for another day. For now it’s biking but I’m not sure about tomorrow.

To get back to teaching, my biggest fear is that I’ll be terrible at it. That the students will hate me, but more, that I won’t be able to engage them and connect with them. I want to create lifelong learners; I want to foster a sense of curiosity, a desire to seek out interesting things outside the classroom. I fear that I won’t be able to do that.

Learning in general has never been too terribly difficult for me and is usually just a reflection of the amount of time that I put into it. However, one of the requirements that I needed to get into the Integrated Science MAT program here at SOU was a full year of Physics. I had never taken any physics courses and it had been more than a few years since I’d taken algebra and trigonometry. Needless to say I struggled. I barely passed the first term (a C+) and in fact didn’t pass the next course, phys 212. I felt terrible and a bit lost. I thought that I had blown my chance to get into this program because to retake 212 meant that I would have to wait an entire year until the class came back around. I was lost for a little while before I finally got in gear and passed the course, and here I am. Going through the struggles of that really brings home that fact that what may be easy for some may not be easy for others and in order to teach many different students with many different styles of learning I have to be creative and patient when I educate my students. Hopefully this course will help me learn better classroom management and how to most effectively make accommodations for those learners that need it.

My topic is ** Inclusion Strategies in Sports Coaching... ** I chose this topic because I intend to coach when I do get a teaching job somewhere. It doesn’t have to be the head coach of the varsity team or anything like that, assistant coach on the freshman basketball or baseball team would be just fine. I just like working with the kids and seeing the strides they make through practice and hard work. I believe that sports can teach so many great lessons and to deprive anyone of that based on outmoded ideas of who can and who should be allowed to participate doesn’t sit well with me. As a coach I will want to include as many as I can and in doing so I may need some strategies to most effectively coach special athletes.

...and these are the 5 things that I learned while researching this topic:
 * 1) Special athletes are just like all athletes when it comes to competition. They just want to play and they want to compete. They want to be a part of the team.
 * 2) Communication is paramount with the athlete and the athlete’s parents. You have to understand the particular disability so you can give each athlete the best opportunity to compete and to achieve. Listen to your athletes!!
 * 3) It seems obvious, or maybe not so obvious to some I suppose, but coaching special athletes is really not that different than coaching non-disabled athletes. The desires and motivations are generally the same you just have to be aware of whatever physical or cognitive limitations each individual athlete has.
 * 4) I was one those, from the above statement, that it wasn’t so obvious for. I was expecting to find pages and pages of strategies on coaching special athletes but that wasn’t so. All athletes seem to be similar in motivations and your job as a coach is just to facilitate the athletes in trying to achieve your goals.
 * 5) In coaching special athletes you can have a variety of different disabilities ranging from the purely physical to the purely cogitative to a combination. The main thing I learned regarding this is that you really need to know each of your athletes as individuals and be extremely familiar with their specific condition. However this just mirrors coaching of non-disabled athletes. Each athlete has things that motivate them and things that don’t. Some need to be yelled at and really respond to it while others will rebel or crumble from being yelled at and instead need to be praised a lot more to really respond. The same thought process is necessary with special athletes as well. Some athletes will not respond in any positive way at all to yelling, for instance someone with autism, while an athlete with a physical handicap who doesn’t want to be “babied” might respond very well to a bit of yelling.

Sources: Each source is rated on a 1-5 scale with a 1 being the best and a 5 being a weaker source.

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(1). An Australian swim team that includes all athletes on it's team. This isn't a special Olympics team or a non-disabled bodied person's team this one team inclusive of all. This video really emphasizes the need to have a team of athletes and not a group of "regular" and a group of disabled athletes. At the end of the day inclusion is the best form of inclusion. media type="youtube" key="cqC00LC-vd0" height="315" width="560" (4). This video shows that young athletes regardless of where they have or don't have a disability can benefit from athletics, and participating in athletics. It is imperative that we as teachers and coaches provide these students and student athletes with as many opportunities as we can.

(2). [] This is the Special Olympics guide to coaching and if you read it you’ll notice there were very few things that you do for athletes with exceptionalities that you wouldn’t do for any other athletic teams. One example in the handbook is the rules. You have rules for all teams of course but in this instance your rules would include a provision to ‘keep your hands to yourself’ that you may not see in other rule books; always rope off areas so the athletes don’t wander onto the field of play is another. Once you get past those few though the rules look pretty standard for all sports teams. Again you really need to treat all athletes similarly.

(4). [] "Coaching well is just about providing opportunities for people as per their own individual needs,’ Pettit said. ‘What we’re trying to do is reinforce that if you have a child in your program with a disability, your coaching practice really should not change. Be aware of the disability but maintain the strategies and competencies that we already have in the program, which is just about catering for individual needs."

 That is a quote from this site and really emphasizes the need to be aware of your athletes and their particular needs but to then just coach them as you would any athlete.

(1). [] This article although full of typos for some reason is a good article about the needs of different equipment and the necessary changes that may be needed to made to accommodate the equipment of the athletes themselves or the sporting equipment.

(1). [] This is more from the Special Olympics and is more of a Q&A,. It gets into some really questions about how to approach Special athletes in the athletic setting and expectations to should and shouldn’t have. It also emphasizes the need to just couch them and not to do a lot of drastically different things. (5). []

This link is just to a google page of searches but it list the Special Olympic handbook sites for a large variety of sports. More of a quick link resource.

(1). [] This is a blog run by a P.E. teacher with two sons with Autism. He has also written a book called “__Different Speeds and Different Needs: How to teach sports to every kid__” I haven’t read it but I imagine it would be an interesting resource. You can find it here:

[] (not sure of this rating so I’ll go with a 3) I had the opportunity to interview a Special Education teacher, and also my Uncle Don, for my CBL. One caveat is that even though he is the special education teacher at his school, Ponderosa Junior High in Klamath Falls, all of his students are generally low readers and don’t have any other apparent exceptionalities. Because of this he doesn’t make a lot of accommodations for his students that would be different than any other classroom. I got there in the morning, about a half hour before students arrived, and asked his a series of questions:

“What is your mix of students and how are they selected for your class?”

**All of his students are classified as LD (learning disabled) and they are chjosen before they get to him based solely on their IEP.** “What are the challenges you face with your students?”

**Keeping them focused is the most difficult thing as his students tend to get distracted easier than other students. Also they tend to have more trouble remembering the things they learned from day to day.** “What accommodations do you use to help facilitate learning?”

**He said that he uses a lot of repetition and clear concise instructions. He doesn’t throw too much at them at one time. Also he has a pretty structured curriculum that he uses, is required to use actually. I’ll address that a little later.** “Are there any other challenges that you face?”

**Budget cuts have reduced the amount of help he has and the paperwork load is obscene.** In first period he had only three students come to his class. These are students that are low learners as well as ELL. What he did with them on this day was just some reading/writing coaching. Each student was to read a passage from a book and then write their interpretation of what they had just read, based on a question prompt. Each student, when finished with that was then given another prompt question, unrelated to the previous reading and they had to write at least 50 words on that question. The teacher circulated and coached as they worked.

The next period the students were involved with a test that seemed to be an ongoing test, meaning it was continued from the previous day and was going to go into, at least, the next day. Although I did ask, I never really understood what was going on here. This test came for a book that is supposed to be the bee’s knees of getting lower readers to be better readers, but is very rigid in how you use it. The teacher didn’t seem as impressed and did express some frustration at being so confined to this book which he was told that he had to use.

The test part went like this: He would read a sentence from his teacher’s edition and then the students would repeat this back at which time he would ring a bell. Then there was a pause during which time they were writing something from the test. The bell rang and he had another appointment so off he went and I didn’t get the real low down on what was exactly the deal with the bell.