Chance to Choice

Following the “cascade model” whereby “coaches coach coaches to educate children,” Coaches Across Continents educates local educators of existing organizations in developing communities to shape a new generation of leaders.

CAC teaches local coaches a new football for social impact methodology focusing on providing youth with a safe and fun learning environment where they can experience new ideas and practice life skills and making healthy choices. Local coaches learn to apply football skills to real life situations such as making good decisions, setting goals, working on a team, resolving conflict, gaining confidence and playing with others of all abilities. In order to help youth practice solving problems on their own or to teach youth about a specific social issue, local coaches learn to recognize and act on “teachable moments” – situations that naturally arise during football games where children are faced with a difficult challenge that they have to deal with individually or collectively.

Coaches Across Continents’ experiential approach aims to combine the development of football skills with the appropriate life skills as outlined above.

From Chance to Choice

Coaches Across Continents has adopted an innovative curriculum development program based upon our own “From Chance to Choice” philosophy first identified and described by Dr. Judith Gates, a member of our Coach Advisory Board.

We believe that young people throughout the world go through similar stages of development:

1. Chance of birth – the inheritance of country, culture, religion, family norms and traditions determine life style.
2. Conformity of childhood – unquestioning acceptance, fitting in to inherited culture, unawareness of alternatives, lead to cultural acquiescence.
3. Conflict of adolescence – ritual rebellion, self assertion, questioning of the taken for granted contribute to the emerging individual.
4. Certainty of post-adolescence – need for peer approval, for similarity, for acceptance, for the avoidance of doubt, leads to culturally created complacency.
5. Contradictions – awareness of ambiguities, recognition of complexity, acceptance that no one answer is sufficient, deepen uncertainty and doubt supporting rejection of that which was previously taken for granted.
6. Challenge – widening horizons, gaining insights, glimpsing alternative ways of thinking, considering options, imagining a different future, open up previously unrecognized possibilities for new ways of living.
7. Choice – growing in confidence, taking personal responsibility, owning your life, creating oneself, choosing a future, empower and liberate from the constraints of the past.

“From Chance to Choice” focuses upon the principles of moving from the chance and conformity of an unquestioned lifestyle, through deepening insight, to the recognition of potential choices. Personal life skills are required to make and act upon these choices.