Mission

Our mission is to offer youth an innovative group therapy experience delivered through the medium of team sports stressing positive youth development.

 

From the beginning, the organization has focused particularly on youth who are burdened with complex trauma, combined with serious emotional disorders, substance abuse, and severely challenging behaviors.  Often this behavior of unpredictable violence has caused their ouster from home, school, and community venues.  For these youth, an innovative and sport based experience is offered through the medium of a therapeutic curriculum (DtG or do the good) embedded in team sports that maximizes their potential to achieve individual goals while providing desired outcomes. 

 

Youth with complex trauma frequently are unable to participate in “conventional” talk therapy because their thinking and emotions are affected by their historical exposure to trauma. Through the Doc Wayne team sports program, they learn to perceive the world as less threatening and their ability to interact with their environment becomes more empowered and gain greater self esteem. Our program is led by coaches trained in the DtG curriculum and consists of regular team sports (soccer, basketball, flag football and softball) as a mediated form of therapy.  The goal is to enhance positive youth development and stabilize youth sufficiently to enable them to form relationships and control behavior, so that learning and trauma therapy become possible.  Our early studies have shown that the Doc Wayne interventions are very effective on the fields and courts, where violence is a rarity and this carries over into their therapeutic settings.  The treatment is swift and economical creating a pathway to recovery which, if blocked, would lead to years of dangerous behaviors and institutional care.

 

Our therapeutic sports program is designed to:

• Promote a youth’s personal development
• Improve his/her capacity for pro-social relationships
• Maximize his/her capacity for inclusion and participation in therapy and school
• Become an experience that youth can apply to all other aspects of their lives on and off the field
• Be a learning organization and continuously enhance the power of DtG to help youth control their emotions and behavior as they face the tasks of life

 

Complex trauma is a serious emotional disorder resulting from repeated incidents of trauma beginning at an early age and persisting ordinarily up to the present. As a result of this persistent traumatic experience, the victims have suffered delayed development, lag in academic accomplishment, and dys-regulated behavior and emotion. These symptoms result from altered neural patterns that are part of the disorder known as complex trauma.  Youth who have complex trauma tend to be resistant to traditional therapy, because their typical response to intervention is protective.  They resist attachment and intervention.  For this reason, therapy that begins with sports-based stabilization is necessary to offer the youth a mind and body experience that is not immediately intrusive, is client-friendly, provides a social setting, and an experience that feels “normal”.  This multi-week session (10 weeks) stabilization should be part of a comprehensive treatment plan for each youth.

 

Although the sports-based stabilization groups were designed specifically for youth with complex trauma, they also can be very effective for other troubled youth who are resistant to traditional talk therapy, and are more likely to embrace physically active approaches in field and court milieus.

 

In recent years there has been a shift in many sports leagues from a purely competitive format, to one that incorporates an additional focus on life skills and other youth development experiences.  This is called positive sports-based youth development.  The Doc Wayne clinical program is designed to address the neuropsychological dynamic underlying the clinical picture of complex trauma in adolescents.  For our current population, who already are removed from mainstream peer and school experiences and who often feel “out” of the norm, it is essential that every resident feels welcome to join the program without fear that their “skills” will be a limiting factor to their participation. Additionally, we want every participant to have the most amount of time possible to play in the games and practices.  We encourage all coaches to make choices that maximize each player’s active participation as opposed to emphasizing playing your more skilled players to win games.

 

There is evidence too that competition can have positive outcomes:

• Helps provide youth with a sense of purpose and responsibility
• Can effect a youth’s self-esteem in a positive manner
• Can help an athlete learn how to win and lose with class
• Serves as the medium for the decoupling of “success” and scoreboard results
   

It is our intention to promote an experience for each participant where they can measure their “success” and self-esteem based on their own performance, as opposed to whether their team won or lost the game.  Doc Wayne is not solely recreational. There are referees, organized league structure, rules, winning teams and losing teams.  We want to be very clear that winning is not the first priority in the program, but we also acknowledge that competition is an important aspect of the “Doc Wayne Experience.”