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Sports at SRV

Like many physical education programs, The School in Rose Valley's Sports program is dedicated to the promotion of a life of physical health for its participants, the development of physical skills and the promotion of teamwork and fair play. Twenty-five years of development have added many nuanced layers to that fundamental principle and the unique methodologies through which it is pursued sometimes obscures it to non-participants.

For a physical education program to stay true to its primary goal, it must first seek to promote universal participation. This is becoming increasingly difficult in a culture whose dominant model for engaging in (and valuing) physical play is moving further towards early specialization, elite leagues and parental dreams of scholarships. By the age of six or seven many children have already decided (or had decided for them) whether playing in a game that involves a ball is something they can or want to do. Many a physical education program seeks to overcome this early disconnect using simple coercion through reward or punishment to guarantee the involvement of these students whose physical interests and abilities have been marginalized – at least in the short term.

SRV seeks to foster in children a genuine and lasting enjoyment of physical play. It is something of an irony that the school's program is titled "Sports" as one of the distinguishing characteristics of the program is the recognition that not all healthy physical pursuits, lifelong or otherwise, fall neatly into the activities routinely listed under this heading. While competitive sports are a component of the program, the school's mixture of these mainstays with classic and newly emerging "neighborhood" games, physically challenging free play experiences, group-building activities and cooperative games provides children with a menu of choices for physical engagement that extend well beyond those featured on ESPN. For younger children, Sports is easily remembered as an opportunity to "Get some exercise and have some fun." No matter the discipline, children need to feel safe to give their best efforts, to find their current limits, to stretch and to grow. A child needs to feel physically, socially and emotionally secure to take the risks necessary to learn. In the physical education program and mixedage recess games, as in other disciplines, the school aspires to provide a responsive atmosphere in which all children feel free to engage in their education with the knowledge that their teachers, classmates and schoolmates are supportive of their aims and efforts.

Mixed-age lunch recess games allow the K-6 children to come together and play as a school. The younger children get a chance to challenge themselves and learn new skills and the older children have the opportunity to coach and encourage (as older children had done for them just a few years before) and learn to temper their play to stretch, but not overwhelm, their younger schoolmates. This support and the success that it ultimately engenders help children clear the early hurdles of feeling competent and keeps them coming back for more, not because their team won or they got to get ice cream when they were done, but because it felt good to get out and play with their schoolmates.

These same skills of recognizing and supporting a range of abilities are then carried back to Sports classes and their peers where my greatest twin joys are to see physically advanced children push themselves to new levels of ability and see children who don't perceive themselves to be athletes or people who enjoy sports relax into the supportive environment of the program and lose themselves in the simple joy of physical activity. For the latter group it is especially gratifying because in redefining themselves in those moments, they often come to the realization that it has been the structures surrounding play rather than play itself that they have been seeking to avoid. Regaining these lost participants, reconnecting them with their stifled interest in physical activity is essential to meeting the Sports program's primary goal.

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20 School Lane : Rose Valley, PA 19063 : 610.566.1088 : office@theschoolinrosevalley.org