St. Laurence High School football coach Adam Nissen has never been one to shy away from tough subjects.
As a white social studies teacher who for more than a decade has taught African American history at the school in Burbank, Nissen knows the importance of communication in understanding each other in a more productive way.
“As a teacher of 15 years, it’s something I’ve always brought into my classroom,” he said. “I’m a big believer in having open and honest conversations and hearing as many perspectives as you can. … I’m a firm believer in just having an open dialogue about issues like that. You can solve a lot of problems.”
So, when Nissen got a message from the Chicago Bears about a virtual series designed to equip high school coaches with the knowledge and tools to address racism and injustice through their teams, at their schools and in their communities, he jumped at the opportunity.
“Especially with the social climate we were going through, I thought it was important to sit in and listen to different perspectives, different people talk, and let the experts talk about different techniques and strategies,” Nissen said. “There was a lot of really good dialogue between the coaches.”
The program in May was facilitated through a national nonprofit called RISE. Gustavo Silva, the Bears’ manager of youth football and community programs, said RISE did a program for the Bears’ staff. Silva liked not only the material but also how it was presented.
“I think when it comes to the topics of racism, prejudice, bias and things like that, coaches have a lot of experience,” Silva said. “They deal with kids from a lot of different backgrounds, but I think that very few people feel really confident that they are experts. Coaches want to come in and feel more comfortable, so they feel better prepared to engage in that dialogue. A lot of the work that is done is just in having common knowledge, common vocabulary, common understanding so that then people can go back and engage in a dialogue.”
When George Floyd was murdered last year in Minneapolis, Nissen pulled his St. Laurence students into a Zoom meeting to give them a place to discuss how they were feeling about the news and what was unfolding nationwide in the wake of Floyd’s death. Nissen knows his students appreciate those efforts.
More Top Picks Best Turntables For Vinyl Collectors
“The feedback I’ve gotten has always been good,” he said. “It’s one of the few places kids can be open and honest.”
Nissen said he learned a lot from the RISE series. It is not necessarily about a specific technique so much as how to be a better facilitator of those discussions, he explained.
“It’s really not something I can put my finger on,” Nissen said. “I like to think we have really open dialogue if any social issues come up. … With high school boys, it’s a little bit different, because they don’t want to talk about anything.”
But Nissen’s goal is to give both his students and his team a platform where they can feel comfortable having these discussions and know how to engage in them while remaining respectful of other perspectives. It helps that St. Laurence and the football team are also relatively diverse for the area, he said.
“I’m really lucky that my team comes from all walks of life, races, social-economic status — we’re a hodgepodge of guys,” Nissen said. “It’s really cool to see guys come together, guys that would probably never speak to each other if it wasn’t for football, sit down and have some of these dialogues. I think we’re going to be that much better equipped to do so.”
Silva said that is the ultimate goal — not to give coaches a series of steps to follow so much as the capacity and content knowledge to have productive discussions. It is also about emphasizing that those conversations can make a difference.
“Hate and racism and intolerance can be learned and can be taught,” Silva said. “So, the opposite is true, as well. Love and tolerance and acceptance, valuing diversity and valuing inclusion, those things can be taught, as well.”
And who better to teach them to impressionable youths than leaders in the sports community?
“Coaches are some of the best teachers and most impactful people that are ever going to come into our lives,” Silva said. “I think coaches have a responsibility, the privilege and the platform they can use to go back to their home communities and make those changes and empower others, because that is really what this is about.”
Nissen said the St. Laurence administration has been “awesome” about supporting his efforts.
“They’re very supportive of it,” Nissen said. “You’re always going to get the people who are like, ‘coach football and shut up.’ But to be honest, I coach high school football; I’m not an NFL coach. I’m still in the process of developing young men and getting them ready for life outside of St. Laurence. … There’s a lot bigger issues than high school football that we have to talk about.”
That is a key part of why RISE connects with professional sports organizations such as the NFL. Kim Miller, the organization’s vice president of programs, called sports a “unifier,” with the ability to connect with diverse communities while working with student-athletes, professionals, coaches and executives.
“We are a nonprofit that uses sport as a vehicle to eliminate racial discrimination, champion social justice and improve race relations,” Miller said.
Their work includes basic vocabulary lessons, such as equality versus equity. It also asks participants to think about how to use their privilege for good, instead of simply seeing it as something with negative connotations, Miller said.
“We believe it’s important to increase knowledge and build skills in order to make a change,” she said. “But it is also about empowerment. It’s how we’re seeing coaches or student-athletes hold their administrators accountable to put in policies within their schools or school districts that say ‘We will not tolerate racism or other behavior that belittles people or does not allow them to be their full self.’ We want to see those systemic changes take place, as well. … It starts at that individual level in order to change those systems from the inside out.”
Miller lives in Minneapolis, less than a mile from where George Floyd was murdered. She is also a Northwestern University graduate, and seeing this program take off in the Chicago area has been something “very personal” to her.
“To see and hear from people that are in the surrounding communities and know that they’re saying ‘This was valuable for me; I wanted to bring this back to my team’ … it’s really powerful to hear that people are inspired to act,” she said. “We always want to make sure our programs don’t just exist in the two-hour session. We want it to go beyond the sessions themselves. That’s when we know they’re a success.”
Nissen’s participation has been a personal journey, too. The series with RISE included a segment in which participants were asked to admit assumptions, values and predetermined opinions (or bias) they may have. Nissen acknowledged that can be an “uncomfortable” exercise, but that it will make participants “that much more prepared” to have those discussions going forward. He also saw the power of doing that in a group.
“It was really eye-opening and refreshing to hear other people go through the process,” Nissen said. “There are some things I learned about myself that honestly I didn’t expect to learn, but by the time we were done I had a little bit different perspective on the way I see certain things. … Some of the things we did made me a little more enlightened, just within myself. I’m not perfect. Some of the things we did and some of the things we spoke about really helped me grow as an educator and more as a coach, too.”
Bill Jones is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.