Chaminade Hosts “Super” Saturday for Fifth Graders

A bevy of fifth graders and their parents descended on this past Saturday, not for some early enrollment event but as part of a program where older athletes help younger students deal with life both on and off the field.

“The program’s about 25 years old,” Athletes Helping Athletes Director Warren Breining said. “It was established by Mineola and Chaminade.”

Replicated and operating in about 40 school districts in five counties throughout the Tri-State area as well as Rochester, the Student-Athlete Leadership Team (SALT) program trained more than 20,000 student athlete leaders and reach an estimated 300,000 elementary students.

The program is designed to “mobilize the real solid citizen student athletes to process important issue for the younger kids,” Breining said.

High school students are trained in public speaking, problem solving and work methodology before adopting a fifth grade class to focusing on various aspects of sports and life and work in pairs with the students.

The first session is all about “building relationships,” Breining said. “They also in that first session establish themselves as a resource and they take questions about middle school,” including if you get locked in a locker and if the teachers are mean.

“That’s what we’re taking advantage of, there’s a lot of curiosity at that stage because of the transition about to come,” Breining said.

The second visit deals with sportsmanship, civility and bullying while the third session focuses on drugs, alcohol and substance abuse.

Joining Breining was former New York Giants running back Billy Taylor, who has been a part of the program for the past 18 years.

The most important thing Taylor tells kids is to “refrain from any negativity. Anytime that you see any negativity you need to report it.”

Fifth grade was selected because the average age of experimentation with alcohol has dropped to 12.7 years old. “Like everything else, they’re doing things younger and younger,” Breining said. “Kids are growing up much faster so we really need to create these prevention programs at an early state so that they have a frame of reference early on.”

Taylor added that “if you have a friend that you’re hanging out with that’s doing something bad, even if you’re not doing something bad, people judge you by who you hang out with so they’re going to stereotype you. You’ve got to hang out with the right people, you have to make the right decisions.”

Besides doing well in school, Taylor advises kids to simply participate.

“It doesn’t matter – cheerleading, band, whatever,” he said. “And don’t go home and watch video games and watch TV all day because you’re busy. If you are playing any sport – soccer, basketball, tennis, whatever – then you’re working and putting the effort into it on a daily basis, by the time you get home and eat, you’re going to be tired and that’s the way it should be; too tired to play video games, you’ve got to go home and go to bed.”

High school students first receive training in October with the initial visit before the holidays while the second visit occurs around February.

“This is sort of the culmination,” he said of Super Saturday, joking “we’re fortunate to have the Mets paying for the food.” The National League club has sponsored the conference series along with Sharp Electronics for the last 21 years. 

While Breining said the program receives a lot of positive anecdotal feedback back, “the difficulty is to really gain an empirical study of what the impact is on a fifth grader” because they need to follow for 15 years.”

The program also hosts a specific workshop for parents on Super Saturday because “this generation of parents is actually legendary for being overinvested and pushing kids, whether it be AP students or an advanced athlete,” Breining explained, referring to the rise of travel teams, specializing in one sport at an early age and the hope of getting a sports scholarship to college.

“The travel teams are indicative of the overinvestment of parents which has led to the commercialization of it and gearing it towards more advanced athletes than just regular kids,” Breining said. “Once its become commercially driven the child development needs of the kids are put on the back burner. There are so few scholarships and there are so few kids who get scholarships you’d be better off putting in a CD.”

According to Breining, in order to stop the behavior “you try to educate. We’re not teaching kids properly because obviously you’ve got a generation of kids where obesity is our number one issue so we’re not teaching sports properly.”

With many households now having both parents working, Taylor says it can be easy to let kids adopt unhealthy habits such as watching TV or playing video games at length.

“Try to see if they can keep them on the active list,” he counsels. “I think the parents should just stress the activity part of it and try to do more things with them.”

In order to spend more time running with his son, Taylor records the sports game so he can watch it later.

“Try to be active and find out how your kid’s day is,” he said.