American Youth Council

Coaching for Competence and Character

Proactive Coaching's founder is Bruce Brown, who has 35 years as a teacher, coach, and athletic administrator at the junior high, high school, junior college and collegiate level.

Bruce coached football, basketball, baseball, and volleyball.  He is a former National presenter for the NAIA’s Champions of Character program,and a highly recognized sports Clinician – speaking nationally to athletes, coaches, parents, school districts and corporations.

Proactive Coaching has developed workshops and publications that provide application models to coaches, athletes, parents and businesses to:
1. Help leaders positively impact lives
2. Assist individuals and teams reach their potential
3. Develop character-based leaders, teams, programs and businesses
 
 

AYC is a Youth Development and Student Success organization, building capacity for elementary, middle and high school programs in student leadership, service learning, and character. We have a current focus in school-based sports, which we feel is a potentially rich and untapped area for reaching at risk student populations. ‘At risk’ is a term that has grown in recent years to include not only socioeconomic demographics, but risk for young people from negative peer pressure, drug and alcohol use, gangs and violence, bullying, low self esteem, teen pregnancy, and early high school drop out.

We are working with youth development organizations across the country to develop thought-leader partnerships, and explore how fully engaged after school sports programs can be:

1. Engagement tools for drawing parents into students' education experience.
2. 'Levers' in the education system that can be used to attract private sector capital.
3. Access points to a school's community for social intervention.
4. Messaging environments for behavioral modeling.
5. School culture transformation mechanisms.
6. Small learning environments within the larger school structure, for tutoring, mentoring, goal-setting, self esteem modeling, creative problem solving teams, career tools, etc.
7. Student advocacy programs - giving students a voice in the education process, an opportunity to participate in creating solutions, and in innovating change mechanisms.

National Youth Violence Prevention Resource Center – SafeYouth.org

Youth Service America - Guide to Engaging At Risk Youth in Service

The Champions of Character process is designed to instill an understanding of character values in sport and provide practical tools for student athletes, coaches and parents to use in modeling exemplary character traits.

Up2Us is a national coalition that seeks to increase the impact of and access to youth sports as a tool for positive youth development.

Sporting Chance - Young women who participated in sports were 40 percent less likely to drop out of high school and 33 percent less likely to become teen mothers than their non-athletic counterparts.