AthLEADs seminars prove valuable for Agnes Irwin athletes

Rosemont >> “Giving and Receiving Feedback,” the second of three AthLEADs sessions held for Agnes Irwin School athletes, proved to be a popular topic for the nearly 100 Owl athletes, coaches and staff who participated in the recent seminar held Dec. 12.
Agnes Irwin’s Center for the Advancement of Girls and Athletics Department launched the school’s AthLEADs program last year, inspired by the Ernst & Young research that found most female C-suite executives were former student-athletes.
“Based on this research, and other research on what is best for girls, our teams collaborated to create a female-driven seminar series for student-athletes to help build leadership skills that are applicable on and off the field,” said Agnes Irwin athletic director Courtney Lubbe, who, alongside her Agnes Irwin colleagues, presented the AthLEADs approach at a National Coalition for Girls’ Schools (NCGS) conference earlier this year.
During the 2018-19 school year, the three-seminar series at Agnes Irwin included the themes of Inclusivity, Communication, and Leadership as a Choice. The first seminar of the 2019-2020 school year was Confidence, held on Sept. 9.
AthLEADs has proven so popular at Agnes Irwin, that it is now attended by non-athletes, coaches and staff at the school as well.
One of the exercises in the Giving and Receiving Feedback seminar involved a student-athlete from each team stacking cups into a pyramid while blindfolded and having to rely on verbal feedback from teammates as to where to stack the next cup.
“My favorite activity tonight was where we stacked up cups blindfolded, listening to our teammates’ voices,” said Agnes Irwin sophomore Katherine Ernst, who plays lacrosse, basketball and tennis for the school. “My team learned that you have to go into someone else’s view, see it from their perspective. If you touch the pyramid in the wrong place, it will fall apart and everything you worked for is gone, so you have to be careful that what you say to your teammate is appropriate and helpful. You learn about giving positive feedback – calm with no emotion.
“I had one experience last summer when I didn’t give a teammate the best type of feedback, so this exercise helped me out; I look back at that incident and realized what I could have done better.”
Another exercise in the Dec. 12 session involved role-playing for each team, acting out one of four different scenarios.
“I thought the role-playing activity was the most fun tonight,” said Agnes Irwin senior Dayna Thomas, who was the Owls’ volleyball captain this fall. “My team did the third scenario, where we had to deal with the player who is down on the team even though they didn’t play well – I think that’s the most realistic scenario [of the four], it’s really easy to project your feelings onto others. Finding a good way to talk to people, and to get them to pick up their own level of intensity and their own positivity so that the team can do better, is really important.”
What was the most important thing the Agnes Irwin girls learned from the seminar?
Ernst said, “I learned that the first thing you say to someone is very important; saying to your coach, ‘I’m not getting enough playing time,’ isn’t the best way to start a conversation,” said Ernst. “But saying to the coach, ‘How can I improve and reach my goals,’ is the best way to start that kind of conversation.”
Thomas added, “The most important thing I learned tonight was the importance of self-talk as well as the way you talk to your teammates, because the way you talk to your teammates will reflect the way you talk to yourself, and both have to be positive for you to get better as an individual and as a team.”
Many of the lessons the Agnes Irwin student-athletes learned at the seminar will hopefully help them in areas other than the athletic fields, according to Lubbe.
“That’s the idea of this seminar: that the girls can take these lessons that they’re learning on the field, in the pool, on the river, these concrete things that they experience, and help them to understand how they can translate them into leadership skills they can take with them to college, and to the workplace,” said Lubbe.
Alison Monzo, Director of Programs for the Center for the Advancement of Girls at Agnes Irwin, said, “The goal of this series has been to make it clear to the girls that they can draw lessons they learn on the athletic field to other areas of their life, in the classroom, in the boardroom. Yes, these lessons can be applied on the sports field, and that’s likely the first place they will apply it, with their teams, but our hope is that they’re taking this information, translating it and applying it to other areas of their lives.”
The third and final seminar of the 2019-2020 school year is scheduled for Feb. 27, and the topic will be determined based on feedback from the student-athletes on the Dec. 12 seminar.
“We’ve had really good engagement from the girls, and they play a part in choosing the topics,” said Lubbe. “After we finished our seminars last year, we surveyed the girls and asked them, ‘What do you really want to learn about? What’s most important to you?’ and they said, ‘How do we build confidence, and how do you we help our teammates build confidence?’ So that was the impetus for our first seminar [Sept. 9], and we had 160 girls there; they’re really engaged and interested.”
Monzo said, “The feedback from the students on the first session was amazingly positive; what I think is best about their feedback is how engaged they are in the topic, and how responsive they’ve been to the content we’ve developed.
“Giving and receiving feedback is a really difficult thing to have a conversation about, but the great thing about the partnership between CAG (Center for Advancement of Girls) and the Agnes Irwin athletic department is that we work together to create a session that is going to be responsive, fun and to get them to be talking about something that can sometimes be uncomfortable, using different exercises to get them loosened up and have those conversations.”