Last week we celebrated our Winter Sports Banquet, officially wrapping up an exciting school year for Veritas athletics - our girls' basketball team clinched the CCAC conference title last month, girls' volleyball earned a playoff berth, two swimmers qualified for districts and states, and two of our cross country runners competed in the state finals meet. Fresh off the heels of these action-packed seasons, Interim Athletic Director Tracy Leaman muses on why sports are a worthwhile pursuit for students and families involved in Classical Christian Education.

When one thinks of Classical Christian Education, several things come to mind. Studying great classical works of literature, conversations in Latin, the beauty of math and art.

What role does athletics have in Classical Christian Education? After all, isn’t it just shooting a ball through a hoop? Running across a finish line? Bump, set, spike? How does that mesh with grammar, logic and rhetoric?

Quite well, actually! Let's consider the process for not only learning a new sport, but mastering it.

The three stages of the Classical Trivium, as reflected in sports:

Grammar: The Basics

First is the basic facts of the sport. What are the rules? What are the positions? What are the skills needed? It takes years to hone these skills. Repetitive drills, practice over and over and over again. Training and discipline and then secondary development to build on the skills. How can an athlete run faster? Weight training, speed drills, choosing the correct equipment. All of these combine to grow the athlete into an effective participant, much like the grammar phase of learning.

Logic: The Application

Secondly, sports require thinking, a great way to mirror the logic phase. In some sports it’s through memorizing and then applying plays. In others, it’s following the course. In others it’s knowing which swing to use when. There is order and integration of the facts/skills already learned. How does this position and the way an athlete plays it affect the others on the team and how they perform? There is testing of methodology – if an athlete does this particular skill this way, this is the initial result. It’s a wonderful time as a coach to see athletes putting into practice skills that have been learned, while also starting to experiment with their skills and what they can accomplish with what they have learned.

Rhetoric: The Communication

Finally, sports requires communication and strategy, just as the rhetoric phase of Classical Christian Education develops. An athlete seeks to not only implement their skills in a sporting contest, but to help their teammates improve and work together. There is strategy involved in studying the opposing team, learning their strengths and weaknesses and how to mitigate them during the contest. It is a look with the eyes to a teammate to have them make a particular move without the need for words. It is also learning concepts as opposed to specific plays, thus taking competition to a new level.

The skills are the foundation, the implementation is the second step, and learning strategy and concepts is the final step. All of this process mirrors well the methodology of classical training.

Christ: The Foundation and Adhesive

But the one element that sets all of this apart from the average public or classical school is the bond of Christ on a team. Teammates care about each other beyond the field, court or track. They care about the ups and downs of each other, the struggles, the joys, the good times and the hard.

A great example of this is this fall when a player on one of our teams was injured. The injury was severe enough that the player would miss the remainder of the season - heartbreaking for any athlete, and even more so for this one as she missed a good deal of competitive play last year due to an unrelated injury. Other players on the team could have taken a selfish view of how that injury now means more playing time for someone on the bench. What was demonstrated in this case? Almost the entire team came to see the injured player at her house the next day to see how she was doing, encourage her, pray with her, and let her know she is not walking through this alone.

And that is the true culmination of athletics in classical Christian education. Learning, from a biblical perspective, that is a lifestyle. As G.K. Chesterson said, “Education is not a subject, and does not deal in subjects. It is instead a transfer of a way of life.”