Basketball is a loud sport: a joyous cacophony of sneakers squeaking on the court, dribbling balls and backboard shots, and bodies clamouring for rebounds. In practice and during games, it’s a good thing my voice carries. As a teacher, I’m soft-spoken, but as a Catholic school basketball coach, I’m loud. There’s a fine line – that I intentionally never cross – between being loud enough to reach the rafters, and an aggressive personality that stings my players. My wife and I were both college athletes, and our identical twin daughters are feisty guards who have inherited our sense of competition. I’m here to push my team, and to build them up: this game, after all, serves a higher purpose.
We often think of Catholic education as spiritual and academic formation – helping children and teenagers understand the faith and theology of the Church, and to instruct them in its intellectual traditions – but an essential element of Catholic education is a cultivation of the body through sports. In America, Catholic schools are perennial powerhouses in basketball, football and other sports, but the most important element of Catholic school sports is not victory, but demonstrating the importance of unity, tradition, shared sacrifice and treating the body with respect and care.
The Catholic vision for sports is gracefully articulated in a 2018 document from the Vatican’s Dicastery for Laity, the Family and Life. Pope Francis established the Dicastery two years before, in the hope that its work “may be active testimony to the Gospel in our time and an expression of the goodness of the Redeemer.” Titled Giving the Best of Yourself, the document quotes Francis’s address to the Italian Tennis Federation: “The Church is interested in sport because the person is at her heart, the whole person, and she recognises that sports activity affects the formation, relations and spirituality of a person.”
Sports are best viewed in similar ways as art, music and literature: human pursuits that model and sustain beauty, since “beauty comes from God, and therefore its appreciation is built into us as his beloved creatures”. It is a noble, lofty sentiment, and one that is not abstract but concrete in actual practice.
The absence of sports during the Covid-19 pandemic created a real hunger in kids for development and competition. Those lost years meant that my coaching has shifted from helping players reach an intermediate level to introducing the foundations of the game.
The foundations of any life pursuit are ample opportunities for personal formation. When we first learn how to do something, we must be especially attentive towards its structure, its rules and its effect on our mind and body. It helps if our attention is constant and close – but even a group of kids, blessed with boundless energy, must reconcile with structure, rules and effect in order to be competitive in a sport. Coaches serve as mentors in this way; we observe athletes, we let them play, and then we instruct – and the process continues, recursively and constantly.
For basketball, that starts with an increased awareness of the body. Truly, any good athlete must first know how to run, stand, pivot, shuffle and turn. The props of any sport – a basketball, a lacrosse stick, a cricket bat – are merely (to borrow a term from the Catholic media theorist Marshall McLuhan) extensions of the body. My job as a coach is to help my players feel comfortable and then confident in their own skin: to recognise their natural gifts.
Giving the Best of Yourself suggests that Catholic educators and coaches follow the model of St John Bosco, and to embrace sports as “a way to introduce young people to the cardinal virtues of fortitude, temperance, prudence and justice and facilitate their growth in them”. Sports can help “create a culture of encounter and peace”, be “works of mercy” to those “who are marginalised and underprivileged” and can help “create a culture of inclusion”, especially for “poor or displaced children, physically or intellectually disabled persons, the homeless and refugees”.
When St Thomas Aquinas noted there is “a virtue about games” he affirmed the need for our bodies to experience recreation. As Giving the Best of Yourself notes, sport is most successful as a physical and spiritual pursuit when it is guided by a sense of harmony: “When sport is pursued in ways in which the human body is seen as a mere material object or the person as a commodity, we run the risk that great harm will be done to persons and communities.”
On the court and on the field, we – athletes and coaches – are individuals, but we must become one, and we have ripe examples for this from Scripture. We might listen to Paul in his first letter to Corinthians: “there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I do not need you’, nor again the head to the feet, ‘I do not need you’. Indeed, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are all the more necessary” – for they must be cultivated even more carefully.
Sports can truly exist as what Pope Benedict XVI called “a sort of ‘Courtyard of the Gentiles’ in which people might in some way latch onto God, without knowing him and before gaining access to his mystery, at whose service the inner life of the Church stands”.
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