Alliance for Catholic Education
Play Like a Champion Today (PLC) has expanded the reach of its game plan for character education through student athletics. Lynn Kachmarik, a former professional athlete and leader in college coaching who now serves the PLC program as director of national outreach, is focusing on international outreach for much of this year—via a "world tour" of schools.
Kachmarik has addressed coaches, parents, and promising young athletes in countries including Belgium, Russia, and Thailand, often conducting a workshop about PLC's mission at a major city's international school for English-speaking students. That was the case in Singapore in January and in Moscow on April 3-4, 2015, for example.
Kachmarik is accepting invitations from these schools and other organizations to work directly with, and learn from, coaches, student athletes, and parents in various cultures. These workshops and other formats for teaching the importance of character-based leadership in sports will bring her to several more countries, including South Korea, Honduras, and Ethiopia, before the current journey ends in the fall of 2015.
"Many of the issues we face as sport-parents and coaches are the same around the world, and we can address them together," Kachmark said. "I've met many fantastic sport leaders in the countries I've visited, and the Play Like a Champion Today passion for character coaching resonates with them. We share the values in this approach that can help unite people locally and globally."
Clark Power, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame and founding director of Play Like a Champion Today, said he's been gratified to see the sports-education program grow to engage school participants in more than forty states and four continents. Various formulations and expressions of the program are offered through Notre Dame's Institute for Educational Initiatives (where Power is a faculty fellow) and the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE).
"Our movement to transform youth sports through character education is attracting more attention and engagement in many locations and at all levels of schooling," Power said.
Around the globe, from neighborhoods in Orange County, California, to Red Square in Moscow and villages along the River Kwai in Thailand, students play sports in ways that can help them to develop as wise decision-makers and constructive participants in society, Kachmarik said in reflecting on her recent travels.
Play Like a Champion Today will continue to travel and to offer workshops from South Bend to numerous states—in public and Catholic schools—to additional nations, showing its commitment "to encourage the best forms of play," she said. In addition, several international coaches will attend the PLC Leadership Conference at Notre Dame in June.
The Play Like a Champion website describes the conference and the ways in which an array of schools and communities are discovering character education through sports.