School Name:Seacrest Country Day School - Upper School
Grant Request Grade:9-12
Grant Request Subject:Health/P.E.
Additional Details
A student misses three shots in a row. Does she throw the ball down in frustration, or does she reset and try again? A teammate makes a bad pass. Does the group blame him, or pick the play back up together? Basketball hands you these moments constantly, real, unscripted chances to practice exactly the values Seacrest asks every student to build.
This class uses basketball as the vehicle, not the point. Each of Seacrest's six core values, kindness, respect, integrity, perseverance, curiosity, and responsibility, gets tied to something students actually do on the court: perseverance shows up when you keep shooting after missing, integrity shows up when you call your own foul nobody saw, respect shows up in how you treat the person guarding you.
This connects directly to Seacrest's mission of cultivating quality of character and teaching ownership of the educational experience, students aren't told what integrity looks like, they practice it in a live, competitive moment where it's actually hard to choose.
Each class session opens with a focus value for the day, then plays it out live. A perseverance-focused day might mean a shooting drill where the whole point is the misses, not the makes, tracking how many attempts it takes to hit a target number, and talking afterward about what it felt like to keep going. A respect-focused day might mean scrimmaging in mixed teams using the pinnies, with explicit rules around how players talk to teammates and opponents.
After play, students log a quick reflection: which value showed up today, for them or for someone else, and how. The laminated value posters stay visible courtside as a constant reference, not something students only see once at the start of the unit.
This is structured, taught class time, not free play. The Assistant AD runs the session the way any PE or character-education class runs, with a clear focus, a live activity, and a reflection built in every time.
Students get repeated, live practice connecting an abstract value to a specific choice they just made, which sticks far better than hearing the word "perseverance" in an assembly. Over a semester, the goal is for students to start naming these values unprompted, noticing perseverance or respect in the moment without being told to look for it.
Success will be tracked through student reflection logs, watching whether the language students use shifts from generic ("I played basketball today") to specific ("I called my own foul even though we needed the point"), plus informal observation of how students treat each other during competitive moments over the course of the unit.
The portable hoops are the physical anchor the entire class runs on, without them, there's no live activity to build the values conversation around. Basketballs in sufficient quantity mean students aren't standing around waiting their turn. The posters keep each day's value visible and concrete rather than abstract. The reflection journals are where the actual character-education work gets captured, students naming what they saw and did, not just what they played. Cones and pinnies support structured drills and mixed-team scrimmages designed around specific values like respect and cooperation.
1930
Mid-tier portable basketball hoop (35+ gal base, breakaway rim)
