Our 1st Bay Area BOSS™ (Business of Success beyond Sports) camp staged with the support of the Hayward Unified School District, marked the expansion of the BOSS “process” from Southern CA to Northern CA. Our Bay Area BOSS™ camp was the result of interest in the “process” generated by our 1-day showcase of BOSS™ for 350 Bay Area student athletes at the Field Club at Memorial Stadium on the Cal Berkeley campus as part of Super Bowl 50 activities.
We presented an amazing 2-week STEM based academic, leadership and personal development experience for 50 HUSD middle-school student athletes.
We started each day with “Jump Start”, an hour of agility, quickness and speed training exercises led by Mike Neal of Real Neal Sports. Our mornings also included a STEM curriculum and our “Math Madness” competition, a spirited math problem solving competition pairing student-athletes on teams in a single elimination tournament akin to the NCAA’s March Madness basketball championship series. The team of Gilberto Casillas and Cassandra Valdez-Sanchez, representing UC Berkeley, won the 2-week long tournament.
The theme of the STEM component of the BOSS camp was Rhythm & Athletics, and focused on Design, Media and Technology. Each day began with an assembly to recap followed by a circle discussion to allow for the sharing of individuals/collective goals, ideas and project responsibilities for the day.
Morning sessions focused on discussing social and cultural implications of STEM applications, specifically the widespread integration of drones into commerce, service delivery, humanitarian aid, agriculture, environment protection and human rights monitoring. During assembly, students had the opportunity to practice real-life problem solving skills by deliberating with their peers on what focus should be given to the day. The final goal was to have students experience the paradigms of team-oriented design that are prevalent in the computing field today: rapid prototyping and collaborative development.
An amazing lineup of subject matter experts including Dr. Clarence M. Lee , Dr. Brenda Wade , Leland Thompson and wimZR developer John Parilo shared their insight and wisdom on a host of subjects with our student-athletes, including: character building/personal pathway, civic responsibility/service, decision science, defeating the label, developing a winning attitude, effective leadership, entrepreneurship, financial literacy, fitness and nutrition, power choices, power and dangers of social media, purpose focused living, sport science and winning against the odds.
Field trips included a visit to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View and an afternoon with Oakland A’s executives leading up to their game against the Astros. TJ Carrie of the Oakland Raiders took a break from his preparations for the upcoming season to share his wisdom and experience with the youngsters, and former Earthquakes player Khari Stephenson was joined by Earthquakes mascot “Q” in staging a mini-soccer clinic for our student-athletes.
We will continue the BOSS “process” with our Bay Area BOSS™ students with school year activities that will include mentoring, real world experiences and opportunities for advocacy among the students and their non-athlete peers.
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