Private SCHOOL winner:
Trinity School of Durham and Chapel Hill
Durham, North Carolina
When a student enters ninth grade at the Trinity School of Durham and Chapel Hill, they sit with a counselor and chart an academic path forward. They explore educational interests and goals, review test scores and classes taken, and develop a plan that starts with freshman courses but keeps the end in mind – that moment four years from now when they walk at graduation, prepared for the world ahead.
This exercise is common in high schools across the country. Last year, Trinity added a new layer: A four-year athletic plan.
Students were asked what sports, if any, they had played. What sport and general fitness options might interest them at the school. How those offerings might integrate with any non-school club sport activities they are involved with, or that robotics club that is of interest. And how the adults at Trinity can help them achieve their personal vision, whether it be a college athletic scholarship or just making friends through sports.
Some schools ask these questions informally. At Trinity, it’s put down on paper.
“We want athletes, coaches, and staff to think that way – to set goals,” says Lori Winters, Trinity’s assistant director of enrollment management. “Maybe the first year they play JV but their goal in a year and a half is to be ready to try out for varsity. We’re not just offering sports and asking kids to show up and play.”
Trinity is no athletic powerhouse, certainly nowhere on the level of some of the private schools with national reputations for sports achievement – like Mater Dei in California or IMG Academy in Florida. It’s a small, K-12 school with 183 students in the upper four grades that sends an athlete here and there to NCAA programs, and historically has been known more for its academic chops.
But at the Aspen Institute, we’re honoring Trinity as the winner of our national search in the private school category for our Reimagining School Sports initiative. That’s because a simple innovation like a personalized four-year athletic plan can, if scaled, help modernize the model for school sports across the country and assist in developing the human potential of every student through sports.
“It reinforces our belief that every kid should have an opportunity to play a sport,” says Jez McIntosh, associate head of school. “We’ll give you all the offerings and walk you through them. It increases opportunities to get them involved. It opens the door to say, yeah, you can be part of this program.”
The plans can be valuable in identifying sport options for the less athletically confident or inclined student. Trinity offers interscholastic teams in nine sports, with one each season that is no-cut. As a result of the COVID-19 disruption, intramurals in three sports were added, a format that Athletic Director Sophie Smith plans to continue to support as a means of introducing students to sports in a less pressurized way. There also are two club sport activities at the school, disc golf and a winter running club. Eighty-five percent of students participate in something connected to sports or physical activity.
Top athletes also derive benefits, from smart cross-training to college planning.
Zachary Powery is a rising 10th grader. Baseball was his sport up through middle school, but now it’s basketball, a game he says he wants to “take as far as I can go with it, college, pro, who knows.” When Powery dropped baseball, Smith encouraged him to add track and field, which he had never tried.
“The first time I threw a discus, it went out of bounds,” he says. “It was very embarrassing. All these kids at other schools, they looked like professionals.”
He worked through the awkwardness and hit the weight room with a plan designed to build the type of strength that would serve him well in both of his sports. By the end of his freshman year, he had more than doubled his throw, to 69 feet. He did even better in shotput, qualifying for the state championship.
“Track gave me more confidence as an athlete,” Powery says. “It made me not afraid to try new things, not just in athletics but in life.”
Smith says that part of developing an athletic plan is gently helping students get realistic about their prospects of playing in college. When she pulls out the NCAA statistics showing the long odds of playing Division I sports, “jaws literally drop.”
These meetings consist of her and the student alone, so they develop a plan that truly reflects the desires and adjusted pathway that makes sense to the student – not their parents. But sometimes Smith follows up with mom or dad, who aren’t always so easily convinced their child has less than unlimited athletic potential.
That’s what she did with the parents of Abby Love, a lacrosse athlete. Since Trinity doesn’t offer lacrosse, Love played for a club team, and on that traveling circuit – as so often happens in youth sports today – the carrot of a Division I scholarship was made to seem there for the taking. Still, Love wasn’t getting the desired looks.
“We had to say the best fit for Abby was not putting all of her eggs in the DI basket, but rather DIII,” says Smith, who played college lacrosse.
Love is now headed to Swarthmore College, a top Division III school in Pennsylvania, as a recruited athlete on a partial academic scholarship. She says she’s excited.
“We got more real about what needed to be done to play in college,” Love says.
Having tools to manage parent expectations is no small thing. That is especially true at private schools, where parents pay tuition (it’s $23,000 a year at Trinity), are often highly involved in school activities, and seek a return on investment.
“I don’t think this school can put in place anything that controls parents’ dreams about sports and their kids,” McIntosh says. “But, showing them the big picture and how we will support their student over time is a valuable piece to the puzzle. We can say we sat down with your student and they said this is their goal. It’s another tool in communicating with parents about our (school) philosophy.”
For Smith, the plans are a work in progress. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted her ability to fully develop and implement them with each student. The plans live on paper and she wants to digitize them, for easy updating and distribution. Could injury and health information, including that collected by the school’s athletic trainer, be integrated, to help guide decision-making on sport options? Could links to related resources be added? Lots could be built on top of the platform.
Developing a digital template that could be shared with other schools would be key to scaling. Old habits die hard and athletic directors have tight budgets, so they’ll need to see the value of adding such a feature to their program format. At larger schools, there’s also the issue of capacity: Do they have time to meet with and review the interests of each student, as academic counselors do?
Smith insists these are challenges that can be met.
“It absolutely can be adopted at public schools,” she says. “If it becomes part of the DNA (of onboarding a student at a school), the kid can fill out the form.”
Strategies that Trinity School of Durham and Chapel Hill use that stood out as exemplary to the Aspen Institute and our project advisory board:
Hire a sports parent trainer
Youth and school sports programs everywhere struggle with parent expectations. To address this challenge, Trinity uses Dr. Greg Dale, director of sport psychology and leadership program for the Duke University athletics department. Trinity bought his online program as a guide for parents to help their child. He has conducted seminars for parents and coaches to help children succeed in sports. He works on how to enjoy sports, avoid early sport specialization, and coach all players – not just the team’s best athletes.
Develop student ideas
Trinity has a senior capstone project in which about five seniors dive deeply into an area of athletics: coaching teams, sports information/ journalism, setting up a club, etc. It’s a graduation requirement. This year, one senior has coached the middle school tennis team and another senior is helping the AD launch the student-athlete leadership team. Students write reflections throughout the year, and do a final presentation in front of friends, faculty and the mentor of that program. Trinity athletics sometimes adjusts what it does based on student papers.
Carve out room for free play
Trinity opens its gym and fields after school and on the weekend. Anyone who wants to participate can come out. It’s also an opportunity for new students to get to know coaches and other athletes. Still, most of the students who come out to open gym are either already on the team in that sport or plan to try out. At lunchtime, there’s open weight room and open gym for any student as long as there’s supervision. Pre-COVID, it was a popular spot for students to hang out on campus and students would eat lunch in the gym lobby.
Says Winters: “It starts with the philosophy that athletics is more cocurricular than extracurricular. Often, athletics is treated like an afterthought and (the four-year plans) send the message of, no, it’s part of the overall student experience.”
It’s also part of building a cohesive school culture, Trinity officials say. High sport participation rates mean that most students are striving together in competitive, team-based situations that build bonds and allow them to see talents and character traits that aren’t so easily revealed in classroom settings alone. That, in turn, can help create the conditions to have conversations about tough topics.
Race, for instance. Students say they have seen that play out in the wake of last year’s social unrest after the killing of George Floyd. Like most private schools, Trinity’s students are predominantly White, and Smith says that some Black students have struggled to feel accepted at times. Powery has attended Trinity since second grade and said that talking with classmates about racial issues has gotten easier over the years, aided by an increasingly diversified student body.
“Overall, they’re just trying to create a more welcoming environment,” he says. “Sports is important for that.”
Like fellow rising sophomore Powery, Kaitlyn McLeod is Black. She plays volleyball, basketball and track, and was the state 100-meter champion this year.
“I personally have not experienced anything at Trinity other than welcomeness,” she says. “We really talk about the issues in the world. It wasn’t that way before I came here. We were taught to keep those conversations out of school.”
It’s one more reason Smith feels so strongly about personalized athletic plans designed to ensure that students have pathways to keep them playing sports.
“The gym seems to be a safe space for students,” she says. “Sports, if we do it right, is a great leveler because we are literally on a level playing field. For the White kids, they see how excellent a lot of Black athletes are and how hard they work. It’s a great crucible of ideas and learning and reality, and of ‘let’s put things aside.’ There’s no better place than a team to do that well.”