Coach for College: A Program for College Athletes to Help Provide Youth with Access to Quality Higher Education Through Sports
Coach for College provides a forum for American college athletes to use sports to help provide youth in developing countries with access to higher education.
About You
Location
Project Street Address
Project City
Project Province/State
Project Postal/Zip Code
Project Country
Your idea
Sport
Tennis
Year the initative began (yyyy)
2007
YouTube Upload
Project URL (include HTTP://)
http://vietnamnews.vnanet.vn/showarticle.php?num=02EDU010807 (article in The Vietnam News)
Positioning of your initiative on the mosaic diagram:
Which of these barriers is the primary focus of your work?
Few effective tools for personal improvement
Which of the principles is the primary focus of your work?
Use sport to build character
If you believe some other barrier or principle should be included in the mosaic, please describe it and how it would affect the positioning of your initiative in the mosaic:
My program seeks to address three other barriers in the mosaic. The first part of my program focuses on fostering excitement about learning through sports, having American college athletes work with Vietnamese college students to teach English, science, and entrepreneurship to middle school students using sports as a theme, confronting "the sports are trivialized" barrier. Secondly, my program addresses "lack of safe spaces" by having American student-athletes work together with members of rural communities in Vietnam to build an "all sports facility" (a court lined off for different sports, with bleachers and a shed) next to the community's middle school. This facility will serve as a safe haven for youth, a gathering place for the community, and will attract kids to school. Finally, involving American college athletes addresses "the world of sport is tainted" barrier. With the rise in the level of play, competitiveness, and appeal of college athletics in America, college athletes are often unable to interact with people from other countries through Study Abroad programs and furthermore are unable to engage as deeply in activities on campus or in their communities in the same way many of their fellow students do. Thus there is often a divide between athletes and other students and in some cases athletes' behavior leads to the creation of a divide with the local community. In this era in which athletes are closely scrutinized and frequently portrayed in a negative light, college athletes would greatly benefit from the opportunity to use skills they have acquired through athletic training and competition to enhance America's relationship with other nations.
Name Your Project
Coach for College: A Program for College Athletes to Help Provide Youth with Access to Quality Higher Education Through Sports
Describe Your Idea
Coach for College provides a forum for American college athletes to use sports to help provide youth in developing countries with access to higher education.
Innovation
What is your signature innovation, your new idea, in one sentence?
Coach for College provides a forum for American college athletes to use sports to help provide youth in developing countries with access to higher education.
Describe your innovation. What makes your idea unique and different than others doing work in the field?
American student-athletes will learn to create a mutual understanding with people of different backgrounds than their own and as a result of their experience, will continue to seek solutions to higher education reform and poverty in developing countries throughout their lives. Youth in developing countries will gain access to facilities and equipment to play sports they enjoy and will be able to interact with positive role models who can help them develop a love of learning as well as learn attitudes and skills from sports which are essential to success in attaining the highest levels of education. The program will foster economic development in rural communities by paying local workers for their time and labor in constructing an all-sports facility. As additional sites are included, the program will allow the summer program's coaches and participants to help with administration of the program, providing "gap year" internships to college athletes as U.S. based site coordinators and jobs to past host country participants as in-country site coordinators.
What are the existing barriers, the biggest problem, your innovation is hoping to address/change?
The innovation addresses barriers for two different groups. College student-athletes often do not have the mechanisms or the time to obtain the same undergraduate experience many of their fellow students are able to attain through participation in Study Abroad and sustantive civic engagement. As a result, they miss out on key developmental opportunities. Youth in rural parts of developing countries do not have access to sports equipment and infrastructure, information about issues critical to their personal health and success, or higher education.
Delivery Model: How do you implement your innovation and apply it to the challenge/problem you are addressing?
American college athletes and bilingual athletes or university students of the same age (as well as bilingual high school students when possible) will jointly conduct sports clinics, build sports facilities, and teach educational workshops to the youth in the program. In the first three week segment, entitled "Laying the Groundwork for College", sports clinics will be taught at an urban sports department, classes on academic and life skills subjects using sports as a theme will be taught in classrooms at a local university, and tennis courts (with different lines painted on it for other sports) will be constructed in the rural community where the youth live. In the second three week segment, the sports clinics will be moved to the rural village, where the new facilities have been built, and educational workshops will focus on "making college a reality" through seminars on the college application process, what college is like, and the importance of higher education to the future of people and nations as a whole.
How do you plan to grow your innovation?
While the pilot coaches will mostly be student-athletes from ACC schools, the program will ultimately provide college athletes of different genders, ethnicities, sports, universities, and NCAA Divisions the opportunity to cooperate and learn from each other as they draw on skills they have developed through their mutual participation in college athletics. Following the launch of the pilot in Vietnam in the summer of 2008, the model will be extended to other countries, focusing initially on Belize, Laos, and South Africa, where I already have contacts. According to the non-profit Peacework, with whom I am partnering on this initiative, other countries amenable to this program are Kenya, Ghana, Cameroon, Malawi, Russia, the Czech Republic, Kosovo, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Peru, and Costa Rica. I am also going to work with professors at Duke to develop a curriculum and guidebook that is user-friendly for student-athletes and can be used effectively in a variety of settings throughout the world, thus allowing the model to be easily replicated.
Impact
Provide one sentence describing your impact/intended impact.
The program will be a formative experience for college athletes and youth as both learn how sport can be leveraged to further education.
What impact has your innovation had to date/or what is your intended impact? Exactly who are the beneficiaries?
I have seen firsthand the impact such a program can have, as some components of the model have already demonstrated some success. Last summer a Hanoi University administrator asked another Duke student and I to train her students in teaching English skills and sports, two activities her students planned to do in a summer camp for children in a rural mountain village later that month. After we taught baseball to her students and a group of children, she asked us to come back to help some high school students with English essay writing and preparing for the SAT. Expounding on these components, the proposed program will help youth develop skills that will increase their likelihood of one day going to college. Furthermore, student-athlete participants will begin to cultivate an identity outside of their sport and will begin to see themselves as social change agents with significant contributions to offer to communities in need, opening up career opportunities student-athletes may never have contemplated before.
How many people have you served directly?
In Vietnam I helped teach baseball to 5 youth and 15 college students. In Belize a few weeks later a group of Duke students and I taught health care education camps, along with soccer and volleyball, to 150 youth in 3 rural villages. The proposed program would serve about 100 middle school students in a given community. In addition, Vietnamese high school students will be recruited to be coaches in the first part of the program and will receive instruction about the steps they need to take in the short term (such as preparing for university entrance exams) to prepare for college in the second part of the program. The precise number of students who participate will be determined by the local People's Committee. At least 10 American student-athletes and 10 Vietnamese university students or athletes will participate in each three week segment. Part of the tennis program may also include a "Pro-Am" tournament between the American student-athletes and local Vietnamese government officials.
How many people have you served indirectly?
This is still to be determined but ideally the program would have a ripple effect, both among college athletes and higher education administrators in America and among other youth, government officials, and the public in Vietnam. It is hoped that student-athletes, who often will go on to become leaders in business and in the government, will become so changed by their experience that they continue to seek solutions to higher education reform and poverty in developing countries throughout their lives, similar to the way Teach for America alumni seek solutions to the problems they see in America’s public schools. Investments in human capital will eventually lead to positive changes in underserved communities, including economic development, poverty alleviation, and more effective higher education systems. Through the popularity of sports, the program will create public awareness about higher education challenges in developing countries and will spark dialogues among citizens and leaders of these countries about different methods for improving their higher education systems.
Please list any other measures reflective of the impact of your innovation?
Other measures of the impact of the program include the number of youth who use the sports facility built by the program, the number of youth who participate in the program (middle and high school students) who enroll in a university and obtain a degree, the extent to which higher education becomes a subject of discourse among the public and government officials in the program's host country and in America (through student-athlete testimonials), leading to policy change.
What are the main barriers to creating or achieving your impact?
Barriers include obtaining approvals from the appropriate Vietnamese government authorities, raising enough money to cover all of the necessary costs, finding a time frame that fits with both student-athletes’ schedules and those of youth in Vietnam, finding the right partners in Vietnam and the right people to help with administration, helping American student-athletes adjust to the cultural and language barriers, coordinating the building of sports facilities and student-athletes’ role in it, and making sure the educational workshops are informative for the youth participants.
This Entry is about (Issues)
Sustainability
How is your initiative financed (or how do you expect your initiative will be financed)?
Initially, the initiative will be financed in large part by Duke University, which will provide most of the student-athletes for the pilot program. I am currently working with Duke's Corporate and Foundation Relations Department to obtain support from corporations, foundations, and individuals with an interest in sports, youth development, higher education, and international affairs. The U.S. Department of State also offers a grant for international sports programs through its Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. According to the NCAA's Vice President of Education Services, the NCAA may be able to provide some seed money for the program through its discretionary funds and may also be able to make a more substantial contribution in future years. I will also seek donations from professional athletes.
If known, provide information on your finances and organization.
The sponsoring department at Duke will either be the Athletic Department, the Center for Civic Engagement, or the Provost's Office. I will work with Peacework, a non-profit organization based in Blacksburg, Virginia, which has several projects in Vietnam, and former Duke student-athletes to organize the on the ground logistics of the program. From my conversations with the NCAA, I have learned that the program may eventually be sponsored by its Education Services Department.
What is the potential demand for your innovation?
The global popularity of sports and the ease with which sports players can serve as role models makes sports an ideal forum for educating kids about life skills, developing healthy habits, and other topics that they may not otherwise learn. Though tennis is quickly becoming one of the most popular sports in Vietnam, currently tennis is not very accessible for many Vietnamese youth, especially in rural areas, for which affordable equipment, facilities, and instruction are not readily available.
What are the main barriers to financial sustainability?
While it is often possible to secure start-up support from national corporations and foundations, it is much harder to gain operating support to transition from a start-up to a more advanced stage, a problem Wendy Kopp encountered in the process of creating Teach for America. This is a problem I may encounter as well but which I hope to avoid by aligning the project with stable organizations such as Duke University and the NCAA which have strong relationships with donors.
The Story
What is the origin of this innovation? Tell us your story.
In October 2006 I began talking to my faculty advisor for the club Global Grasp about creating a summer program which would allow Duke and Vietnamese students to perform research or service linked to coursework in a wide range of disciplines. In April 2007, in attempting to raise money to finance a feasibility study for this program, Ben Wilkinson, the Associate Director for the Kennedy School of Government’s Vietnam Program, suggested I contact Nike, as he said Nike was always trying to promote a better understanding of its operations in Vietnam. In talking to several people at Nike before my trip to Vietnam, it became apparent that they really liked the idea of connecting student-athletes to development projects. These discussions first prompted me to think about creating a civic engagement program specifically for student-athletes, who rarely can study abroad or participate in extensive service or cultural immersion programs in foreign countries. In July, I gained preliminary feedback about the idea from employees in the Nike Vietnam office and the chief official of the Dong Nai Sports Department. The specifics of the program began to take shape after my return from Vietnam, when I began talking to people in the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi and at the U.S. Department of State about their Sports Envoy program for professional athletes. My conversations with university rectors in Vietnam, in parallel with an increasing academic interest in educational policy, caused me to think about what American universities could do to improve higher education there.
Please provide a personal bio. Note this may be used in Changemakers marketing material.
I graduated from Duke with a B.S. in Psychology, concentrating in Neuroscience, and a minor in Physics. I wrote an honors thesis which is currently being submitted for publication. I was a member of the varsity women's tennis team, which twice finished in the top 7 in the nation when I was there. I was also the co-President of Global Grasp, one of the co-founders of the Duke Prospective Health Care Club, and the service-learning coordinator for the Durham Nativity School.
How did you hear about this contest and what is your main incentive to participate? (this is confidential)
In April I was referred by Kit Morris to Stephani Kobayashi Stevenson in Nike's CR Department. Since then I have had several phone and email conversations with her about Nike's interest in helping to support a program of this nature. When I returned from Vietnam, Stephani mentioned that Nike was engaged in heavy collaborations with Duke's Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship regarding an online collaborative competition with Ashoka. Recently, Stephani told me that Nike has been asked by its global community investment teams to encourage anyone they have been in communications with over the past year concerning sports for social change initiatives to submit their plans to the Nike Changemakers Competition regardless of how far along they are in the business planning process. She also said almost all of Nike's new projects in the next fiscal year will take place through this type of open source, competitive process and the competition was a great way to gain broader visibility from other major donors.
Affiliation (please list all that apply)
I was a member of the women's tennis team at Duke University, from which I graduated in May of 2007. I am currently doing a fellowship with the Robertson Scholars Program, a leadership development program that seeks to increase collaboration between Duke and UNC Chapel Hill. All of the UNC athletic teams and the Duke football, basketball, (and next year the women's tennis team) are sponsored by Nike. Over the past few months I have had conversations with several people at Nike, through referrals by Janet Hill and Nike's Director of College Sports Marketing. I have also talked to Wayne Lifshitz, the Director of CARE's Sport for Social Change Initiative, who said he thought the program was an interesting concept and could tie into CARE's work in Vietnam. He also said the CARE Vietnam office could help insure sustainability as the volunteers rotate through. I have talked to Barbara Addy at USAID about their partnership with Nike and CARE in East Africa.
| Attachment | Size |
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| Budget.xls | 37.5 KB |
| Comments_Peacework_Vietnamese_Staff_Member.xls | 30.5 KB |
| Description_of_Program.doc | 61.5 KB |
| How the Program Evolved.doc | 27 KB |
| Summary of Key Steps to Date.doc | 26.5 KB |
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Comments
You have fine plans for Coach for College, Parker, and I'm impressed with the detail of thought that you've invested in this. Many individuals start out with grand ambitions that are actually ill-formed and carelessly slapped together. None of that seems present here at all; in short, you've done your homework.
Many colleges and universities take pains to bring community and campus together. You've extended this to another level, however, through insisting that Duke's "community" is actually global. Further, you seem very determined to combine the best of both classroom lessons and fieldwork partnerships. Well done.
Steve Byars
Marshall School of Business
University of Southern California
Makerere University
Kampala, Uganda
Parker,your initiative is fantastic and I give you respect for that.Is it goin to be co-ordinated by Duke university alone or u gonna to ahead to involve other universities as well.You can look at ma entry(Hawks social change Basketball campaign) and see if we can partner in future.You can even ask some questions that I will answer.
As a student-athlete at Duke, I am very excited about the opportunity to participate in the Coach for College program. I think this is a unique project with huge potential for success. One reason that I feel so passionately about this program is the way in which it benefits everyone involved. It provides student-athletes with a chance to simultaneously have an abroad experience and to engage in meaningful community service work. It also provides the Vietnamese youth with access to the resources and skills they need to succeed. All in all, I think Coach for College is a great program that is guaranteed to have a huge impact.
Mary Caroline Dyke
Duke University
Having been personally involved in the planning process for this program, I cannot tell you how excited I am about it. I will be traveling to Vietnam for an advance planning trip over spring break so that we can give the athletes over the summer sessions a better idea of what Vietnam is going to be like and to make sure that we are fully prepared. I think this program provides a fantastic opportunity for building a global community. Sports are a universal language and this program provides a unique way of using sports to talk about education. By using college athletes, these students passion for athletics and academics are what is going to make this program so successful. I am thrilled to be involved and I know that the commitment of Parker and the other athletes towards making this program a success is great. Please help us make this program possible!
I look forward to participating in this program because I believe that it is a great opportunity to interact with new people in a different environment. I love the idea of promoting sports as a pathway for these children to strive toward their own betterment. As a child, I had participated in a National Youth Sports Program at a university in my home town and the experience has helped to foster my love of sports and has made a lasting impression on me. I know athletics have shaped me into the person that I am and have made me very successful thus far in my life. I appreciate the value of athletics as an avenue to self- improvement and higher education.
I have always felt a great connection to my sports and welcome any opportunity to contribute my skills and expertise in an effort to promote athletics in interested youth. The value to me personally comes from the feeling of well-being that I experience through sport activities and offering my services to others.
I believe that the Vietnamese rural children, high school and college students will benefit from exposure to athletes who have been successful in gaining access to higher education through sports. I hope that by our example and through our sports and educational workshops, we will inspire them to use their athletic interests and skills to better themselves and better their community. The assistance we provide will hopefully motivate our university partner and host community to seek to perpetuate the program so that its benefits may be shared and grow to encompass larger numbers of youth each year.
As a student athlete, I understand how difficult it is to study abroad while in college. Coach for College gives Duke athletes this opportunity. Not only will the student-athletes be able to experience the culture, but they will also be volunteering in a developing country. The student-athletes will have an opportunity to conduct sports clinic and educate the Vietnamese youth on the importance of education. I do have the privilege of going on the advance planning trip in March. I know it will be a highlight of my college career and I am looking forward to sharing my experience with other athletes.
It is easy to get caught up in life here at Duke and forget about how fortunate I am. I’ve decided that I need a major reality check after my first year here at Duke. I am very interested in this program because it combines sports, community service, and children—three of my favorite things. I think that any student-athlete that partakes in this program will grow tremendously from this experience. From the potential constant rainy weather to the language barrier, every step of the way will be a challenge that will expose us to interesting obstacles that we will overcome. It will be a learning experience for all of us-- Vietnamese and American. We hope to teach the students and adults about the importance of sports and the importance of higher education. We have so much to offer because of our experience at Duke, and I hope to use this knowledge to benefit the lives of the Vietnamese. The fact that we could change the lives of children in a foreign country where most of us can not even understand the language is just unbelievable. This trip is destined to be beneficial for every person involved because of the commitment of people such as Parker and everyone else involved in the flawless planning.
I want to participate in the Coach for College program because I want to apply what I have learned and extend the same sorts of athletic and academic opportunities to others who may not be as lucky as I have been. In a country like Vietnam, where there are significant barriers to educational opportunities, many individuals face incredible challenges when trying to obtain an adequate education that can enable them to realize their dreams and aspirations. Everyone deserves the chance to be educated. I believe that we as student-athletes are in a special position to use sports as a method of promoting education, and this program seems to offer a great way to do that. Therefore, my motivation includes the desire to help others gain greater access to educational opportunities and to utilize my personal academic and athletic experience to create a positive impact in the lives of others.
I would greatly appreciate an opportunity to participate in this program because I think that it would be great to give something to the less fortunate in the area of athletics since participating in a college athletic program has been so beneficial to me. I believe that this program will benefit all the students-athletes involved because we will be able to see the difference we make in the lives of the children of Vietnam. Also,
this program will benefit people in Vietnam because it will not only provide them with improved sports facilities and a more sound understanding of American athletics, but hopefully the Vietnamese students will also learn important life lessons along the way, leading to future success.
I think that this Coach for College program is truly going to change young peoples' lives, both the young children who will receive help and the young student athletes who offer their services. I have helped develop the program and I know first hand that the creator, Parker Goya, is very passionate about helping those in need and this will be an absolute success. The children who receive help will takeaway a wonderful experience where they can begin to think about the possibility of attending a college one day. They will develop relationships with amazing collegiate student athletes, who have a lot to offer. In turn, the student athletes will also walk away with once in a lifetime experience where they can give back to people in need. As student athletes, we some time take for granted our position in life, Coach for College will allow us to appreciate our position and help those who have not been given opportunities like us. In closing, I strongly encourage any and all student athletes to experience Coach for College because I believe it will be very successful.
Thanks,
Tony McDevitt
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