Varsity Basketball Coach Chris Rodgers started his three-part lecture series on leadership on Monday, March 11, with a discussion on confidence. In his first meeting, Rodgers led conversations on how to cultivate confidence as young women – on the court, in our classrooms, and beyond – the value of risk taking and how to learn from failure.
Rodgers created this series to teach students the importance of learning how to be confident, persistent and work with others, both in and outside of a sports setting.
“As I coach, I see confidence being one of the biggest issues with players. Their performance is completely affected by how they view themselves. I took it upon myself to open my series up to the community, rather than isolating it to the athletic department, and make it something that everyone can relate to and learn from,” Rodgers said.
Rodgers added that he believes there should be more discussions surrounding confidence-building within our community.
“Students here are super smart, but we need to feed them more knowledge that’s going to benefit them in everyday life. Leadership, teamwork, communication and confidence are skills that aren’t always taught in the classroom,” Rodgers said. “We need to teach students how to use this set of tools to pivot, change and adapt in the real world.”
Lauren ’22 said she enjoyed Coach Rogers’ discussion on confidence, echoing the importance of facilitating conversations like his.
“I think it is important to have conversations about confidence and leadership at Marlborough because it is a big part of Marlborough’s vision for the kind of students they hope to eventually send out into the world. Strong female leaders are an important aspect of Marlborough’s message so it’s important to talk about how to empower our community,” Lauren said.
Nina ’19 said she felt the best part of Rodgers’ lecture was his discussion of failure.
“I really enjoyed when Chris was talking about how we should respond to failure. Oftentimes, I think we see failure as really bad, but instead Chris talked about learning how to ‘pivot,’ and take failure as both a learning and growing experience, rather than a completely negative thing,” Nina said.
The second part of the lecture series occured on Friday, March 15: a Q&A session with Natalie White, the Senior Vice-President of the Sparks, a Los Angeles-based women’s basketball team. White discussed her journey as a female athlete and how she transitioned to a career in team management.
Coach Rodgers’ third and final session will take place on Monday, March 18, and will include a student video about the meaning of confidence, persistence, and teamwork.
