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In high schools and colleges across the country, student-athletes are reporting back to campus for preseason practices.

As a three-sport athlete in high school and a two-sport athlete in college, I looked forward to preseason, especially in preparation for playing soccer in the fall before any classes started, assignments were given, or tests needed to be studied for. My cognitive load as a student-athlete was relatively light before all the academic, social, and emotional demands emerged once the first class bell rang.

I have had the privilege to teach and coach varsity, junior varsity, and middle school student-athletes in each of the three schools I have worked at in Washington, New Jersey, and Maryland. During the first part of each of their days, students brought their brains, minds, and bodies to each of their academic subjects. But then, very rapidly after the conclusion of their last class, they transitioned to the field, court, track, pool, course, or slopes for a practice, game, match, or meet. A third transition for most student-athletes followed, as they returned to their homes to complete their assignments for the next school day. 

Students participate in school sports for varied reasons. I asked some of our St. Andrew’s student-athletes, “Why do you play sports?” As you think about what your student-athletes would say, here is a list of some of the responses I received:

“Making the varsity team and playing for my school is my goal.”

“I need the physical education credit for graduation.”

“I want to be with friends.”

“I like the coach.”

“My parents expect me to play sports.”

“I hope to get a scholarship to reduce college costs for my family, and an NIL deal would be neat.”

“I want to try something new.”

Coaches are teachers. Their impact can be both positive and negative, life-changing and life-debilitating. I spent more hours each week with Coach Swenson, Patterson, and Schwartz in high school and Coach Osborne and Brown in college than any teacher or professor – and sometimes my parents. The same has been true for my teaching and coaching. My 10th-grade “varsity” history class meets for 180 minutes each week at St. Andrew’s. When I was coaching the varsity girls soccer team, we were together for nearly 10 hours each week.

Whether it is in the classroom or on school sports teams, the brain is the organ of learning. As The Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning (CTTL) has worked with preschool through 12th-grade teachers and college professors, we began to see the missed opportunity to share much of the same Science of Learning research, strategies, mindsets, and principles with school sport coaches. We wondered, “What if all school athletic coaches at all levels were equipped with deeper insights into the science of how student-athletes’ brains learn, change, and thrive in their sport?”

During the 2024-2025 school year, The CTTL launched a pilot program with our school’s middle and high school (junior varsity and varsity) coaches in partnership with Kevin Jones, St. Andrew’s Director of Athletics and varsity boys basketball coach. Kevin is committed to training 100% of his coaches in the Science of Teaching and Learning because he believes that continuous, research-informed professional development is the key to helping coaches grow, innovate, and positively shape the student-athlete experience. 

For Kevin, “Coaching has never been just about winning games—it’s about shaping people. Coaching is teaching. When our coaches come together to explore the same research and strategies that we provide St. Andrew’s teachers, we’re not just improving practices and game plans—we’re building collaborative environments where student-athletes can grow their skills, confidence, and enduring love for the sports they play while succeeding as individuals and as a team.”

As the research from the Aspen Institute Project Play shows, school team sports participation outpaces all other ways youth play sports in the United States. There was an opportunity we were missing and a gap we wanted to close that we felt could enhance the student-athlete’s experience at St. Andrew’s.

Professional development for coaches in schools is inconsistent. Many coaches individually attend national conferences for their sports. But coaches are often not treated as a cohort who, while coaching different sports with different technical and tactical demands, are collectively trying to change the brains and minds of their athletes. Lately, when The CTTL presents to classroom teachers, we offer to carve out time to work individually with a school or district’s coaches. In both instances, we answer the question, “What should all teachers and coaches know about how the brain learns?” The CTTL often starts with:

1. Understanding the concept of neuroplasticity.
2. Emotion and cognition are interlinked (and belonging is a condition for learning).
3. Memory is formed by making connections between the mind, brain, and body. 

We then begin applying these principles to how coaches think about and design practice, how they provide direct instruction, give immediate feedback, ask their athletes to think about their thinking, playing, and performance, have athletes memorize plays and build schema, and take care of their nutrition and sleep. We also teach coaches a little neuroanatomy, such as the limbic system (amygdala and hippocampus), prefrontal cortex, myelination, and the parietal lobe, an area of the brain often connected with planning movements and spatial awareness that all sports require.

Like many schools, we have a number of individuals who both teach and coach at St. Andrew’s. We are also lucky to have outside coaches, who often are involved in youth and club sports at the highest levels, such as AAU basketball as well as ECNL and Academy soccer. We are striving to have both types of coaches better understand and deliberately think about Science of Learning research and strategies in the domains of feedback, memory, metacognition, stress, sleep, desirable difficulties, and even homework, which for my history class might be an essay but for my soccer players might be working on juggling with both feet or knowing the vocabulary of their sport.

In no way are we suggesting lowering the competitive bar or goals of winning a league or state championship by training coaches in the Science of Learning. The playing, social, and emotional experiences and outcomes for each student-athlete and their teams can be elevated if the coach understands Science of Learning principles, such as scaffolding, that can help an athlete better understand a sport concept. In soccer, that is usually the offside rule. We deconstruct social and athletic belonging with coaches through a “Student-Athlete Belonging Braid,” which The CTTL initially created for classroom teachers but adapted to sport coaching. The “Braid” was inspired by the work of  Dr. Mariale Hardiman, who at a Mind, Brain, and Coaching convening at St. Andrew’s, explained the concept of downshifting, “A metaphor often used to describe how negative emotions cause us to process in our emotional center and lose focus on higher-order thinking.”

To bridge the gap between the classroom and athletics — the student and the athlete — The CTTL created this chart to reveal how Science of Learning principles converge and diverge in academic settings and on the sports field. Whether in a history classroom or on a soccer field, learning engages the brain, mind, heart, and body through experiences that demand attention, memory, motivation, skill development, and hard thinking. As a coach, I’ve been fortunate to witness firsthand the power of time, intrinsic motivation, and movement in sports — elements I wished were more deeply part of a history class. While analyzing the causes of historical events like the Civil War allows a student to develop critical thinking and perspective on the present, the consistent practice and physical training in athletics might be more enduring, with immediate and lasting influence on students’ lifelong health and wellness habits. This chart highlights how both classrooms and athletic environments use Learning Science principles that are context and student-athlete-dependent. 

Just as there are plenty of research-informed resources available for teachers in the Science of Learning, there has been a growing number accessible to coaches as well. Organizations such as Project Play from the Aspen Institute and the Positive Coaching Alliance have been part of training youth and school coaches. Books like “The Coach’s Guide to Teaching,” “The Inner Game of Tennis,” “The Talent Code,” and “Achieving Excellence: Mastering Mindset for Peak Performance in Sport and Life” are good reads to help coaches think about this “dual-identity balance” that student-athletes face each day.

The CTTL often says that a student has to get lucky to have a teacher or school leader who understands the Science of Learning. The same can be said for an athlete, who similarly has to get lucky to have such a sports coach. As we head into another school sports year and provide professional learning and development for classroom teachers in the Science of Learning, let’s give the same training to the coaches who challenge and support each student-athlete’s brain, mind, and body during each school’s sports season. 

For further reading, see these articles in the CTTL’s Think Differently and Deeply:

• “Building Better Student Athletes,” in Think Differently and Deeply (Vol. 1)
• “Mind, Brain, and Whole Child Coaching,” in Think Differently and Deeply (Vol. 4)
• “Taking Care of the Whole Student Athlete,” in Think Differently and Deeply (Vol. 5)

References:
¹Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program. (2022). Reimagining school sports: A playbook to develop every student through sports (p. 9). The Aspen Institute. https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/FINAL-Aspen-Institute-Reimagining-School-Sports-playbook-pages.pdf

²Brain and mind are often used  interchangeably. However, it is more accurate to know the brain is an organ composed of neurons, biological and chemical processes, and different regions. The mind is where mental processes, such as thinking, feeling, perceiving, and remembering takes place.

³Hardiman, M. (2015, May 5). The Brain-Targeted Teaching Model (PowerPoint slides). Presented at the Mind, Brain, and Coaching Convening, St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, Potomac, MD.

⁴See Mariya A Yukhymenko-Lescroart (2024). “Balancing academics and athletics: Examining academic and athletic identity profiles in a large sample of NCAA Division I college athletes. Heliyon, 10(11). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39559209/and Stephen E. Knott (2016). “The Impact of Dual Identities of College Student-Athletes on Academic Performance,” PhD dissertation Old Dominion University. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/teachinglearning_etds/1/.