"We're moving forward because now is not a time for small plans. It's not a time to pause, to be passive, or to wait around for our problems to fix themselves." President Barack Obama, May 8, 2009.

The whole community suffers when schools, as well as youth and school athletics, are not considered a place to address community issues such as violence, addictions, eating disorders, obesity and depression. The cost of these societal maladies is enormous (at least 25% of any state's budget to deal with the consequences, yet less than 1% of that same budget is for prevention)

Schools and sports teams are ideal places to teach mental health skills because they shape young minds into habits of thinking that lead to emotional health, self-control, academic achievement and long-lasting relationships.

Schools, and sports teams, need a curriculum that teaches the very same skills preventatively that are found in anger management and addiction programs after the fact when the damage is already done. If we teach these skills before the fact, imagine the impact on our society.

There is such an educational plan that has proven to be effective in changing behavior and improving performance in academics. It is called Social-Emotional Learning or SEL for short. (See http://sel4mass.org for lots of information about SEL here in Massachusetts.)

In sports, the applicable science is sport psychology, which fits under the umbrella of SEL. Sport psychology, among many skills, teaches people the techniques for managing emotion and controlling thought. Few schools will teach sport psychology to their athletes. Although the reasons vary, the results are the same. Sports is underused in our pursuit of an excellent education and an improved society. Where there is no curriculum, no educational goals, no uniform plan that all coaches will adhere to, where there is no evaluation of coaches as measured against a student-athletes' knowledge and use of the mental skills taught by the science that applies directly to what they are doing, there is failure in the system.

That this science has been proven to improve performance, just as social-emotional learning (SEL) has shown to improve academic performace, is the irony as there is high resistance to change within the athletic community. The sport psychology community has done little to foment the universal teaching of sport psychology in middle and high schools, turning a blind eye to the importance of such an education for all, not just those who can afford an hourly fee.

The effects of SEL have been measured so they are evidence-based. For instance, teaching social-emotional skills in Seattle, a longitudinal study of 808 elementary school children who received a comprehensive SEL intervention in the first through sixth grade starting in 1981 by the Seattle Social Development Project — participants reported significantly lower lifetime rates of violence and heavy alcohol use at age 18 than no-intervention controls. In other words, teaching kids results in changing adult behavior that costs us both financially and in human terms.

GetPsychedSports.org educates and advocates for the use of schools and sport teams as place to teach preventative mental health skills. In so doing, students are learning habit-forming ways of thinking that can improve academics and reduce incidents of violence, addictions, eating disorders and other societal ills. GetPsychedSports.org will not consider any application of its curriculum without a three year committment to the program. Change does not come easily and while we ask persistance on the playing field, we don't seem to have it in ourselves, so the tendency is to "cut and run" when change becomes hard.

For sports programming, we encourage you to browse the rest of our site. For social-emotional learning here in Massachusetts, see (See http://sel4mass.org for lots of information about SEL here in Massachusetts.)

Contact Us to see how you can help.

Social Emotional Learning (SEL) has proven to improve behavior and academics. See this clip from PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer about the effect of such teaching and think how it could reduce behaviors that cause so much pain and cost so much money.

The piece was produced by Learning Matters at http://learningmatters.tv/