Brewer meeting goes in different direction

BREWER ? A few brief opening remarks, then a few small group activities, and some open discussion ? that was how members of Brewer’s Sports Done Right committee envisioned its community meeting at the high school cafeteria Wednesday evening.

But the committee didn’t plan on Scott Atherley.

Actually, the committee did have the University of Maine women’s soccer coach on its agenda for the evening. Atherley was to make a few comments, and then the committee was to take over with a role-playing skit and other organized activities.

But as Atherley talked about the importance of passion in sports and how some parents foster their children’s love for sports ? and how others can tear that down ? the rest of the evening’s activities fell by the wayside.

“Our responsibility is to create an environment that facilitates the ability to develop a passion for what they’re doing,” he said. “The ones that make it are the ones that are absolutely in love with it, absolutely passionate about it and can’t wait to get back out and do it again.”

Sports Done Right is a federally funded University of Maine initiative that seeks to define healthy interscholastic athletic programs. Brewer was selected as one of 12 pilot sites around that state trying to get the school committee to vote on putting Sports Done Right’s core practices and principles into place.

Each pilot site was instructed to have a community meeting by the end of May. The goal of the meeting is to allow community members to discuss the pros and cons of the report and decide if and how they want Sports Done Right to fit into their athletic programs. The six-member Brewer committee, which is headed up by high school athletic director Dennis Kiah, is organizing the effort to get Sports Done Right implemented in the Brewer School Department.

There were just 15 community members at the meeting, but the small crowd seemed to suit the more intimate conversation between Atherley and the crowd.

“I think we would have liked to see more but this smaller group worked well in this case,” said Brewer Middle School teacher and coach Glen Holyoke, who is on the Sports Done Right Committee.

Rather than standing and speaking in front of the small group, Atherley sat in a chair and talked about a variety of topics, including the appropriate age at which to introduce the concept of winning, how he uses a high schooler’s academic record to determine if he wants that student-athletes in his program, and how easily athletes burn out at young ages.

“Why do you play sports?” Atherley asked a young girl in the audience.

“To have fun,” said the girl, 12-year-old Kristen Dunn.

He smiled.

Kristen, who plays soccer, softball and is a cheerleader, was at the community meeting with her mother, Diane Dunn, and 5-year-old brother Marcus, who is already involved in youth hockey.

Diane Dunn, who used to live in Brewer but recently moved to Glenburn, also has a daughter, Kayla, who is a freshman at Brewer High and is on the junior varsity soccer and softball teams.

Kayla Dunn attended last week’s meeting for Brewer student-athletes and brought home a copy of the Sports Done Right report.

“I really liked a lot of the values I saw,” said Diane Dunn, a lieutenant colonel in the Maine Army National Guard and an ROTC teacher at the University of Maine. “I think we do have a little bit of room to work in our community and I wanted to hear what they had to say and see where they go from here.”