User:Stevey b right/sandbox

We had a Sophomore, who was brand new to the school, join the football team two years ago by the name of Dorion.

https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQjgAKnmcNUajztMecN7V1TEVQ0m_t0tG1wASNb4jotdJEGqQCHWQ

He is the second to the left during a Thanksgiving day potluck in 2013.

As you can see, he is an incredibly large young man with surprising power and speed for his age. . . but his self-esteem was incredibly low. Why? He had an emotional disorder that caused him to become extremely angry for very small reasons. He told me that in his previous school people use to tease him quite a bit when he was a freshmen, simply because it was easy to get a reaction out of him. As a result, when he showed up to Edgren, his self-esteem was incredibly low and he was prone to quitting at the first sign of any negativity or exclusion.

I immediately realized that this young man was in desperate need of positive re-enforcement from his own peers.

At the time, I was coaching the offensive and defensive linemen, and I was able to use the idea of unit cohesion to encourage him. My first order of business was to ensure him that, "that absolutely will not happen here. When you are on the line, you are part of one unit, and one team.  Our linemen stick together." We committed a lot of time to team building exercises. Having his team mates root him on and saying "good job" whenever he finished sprints did enormous amounts for his sense of acceptance-- and rewarded him for having mental endurance. By the time he reached his Junior year, he was like a completely different person. He had confidence, he felt like he was "one of the linemen." He had a peer group of friends, his emotional outbursts were minimal, and you could just tell by looking at him that his emotional health and self-esteem had been dramatically increased.