Athletics & Physical Education

At Shipley, the playing fields are important extensions of the classroom, with unlimited lessons in life skills. Students learn how to work to fulfill potential while they gain experience and refine tactics. They cooperate with teammates and develop healthy attitudes toward competition — whether winning or losing.

Our students don’t have to choose between academic success and sports achievement. They can be good students and good athletes. Athletics combines healthy competition, skill development, and opportunities for each student to participate in ways that are best for him or her.

In our program, everyone learns to play and everyone can play sports. We offer an uncommon number of athletics choices to suit many interests and abilities. Coaches combine passion for their sports with compassion for student athletes.

Curriculum

Lower School physical education follows a carefully constructed developmentally appropriate curriculum that incorporates fitness activities, games, and non-competitive play.

Middle School athletics combines physical education and interscholastic sports. Middle Schoolers play a different sport in each of three seasons.

Upper School students fulfill their athletics requirement each year through:

• two or more seasons of interscholastic sports
• physical education courses, or
• an independent program in athletics.

Interscholastic competition — Students get their first taste of interscholastic sports in 6th grade. All levels of competition include a mix of Friends Schools League games plus non-league competition. Our athletes compete with many independent, public, and parochial schools, including some of the most competitive in the region. View the Sport Schedule.

Multi-sport athletes — Our coaches frequently work together to enable multi-sport athletes to play the sports that they choose.

Postive Coaching Alliance

In 2008, Shipley became a member of the Positive Coaching Alliance, a nonprofit organization founded at Stanford University with the mission to transform youth sports into a positive, character-building experience.

The organization's three national goals include:

• Replacing the "win-at-all-cost" model of coaching with the Double-Goal Coach®, who wants to win but has a second, more important, goal of using sports to teach life lessons;
• Teaching youth sports organization leaders how to create an organizational culture in which Honoring the Game is the norm; and
• Sparking and fueling a "social epidemic" of Positive Coaching that will sweep this country.

The Positive Coaching Alliance has developed practical tools to change the culture of youth sports and is making them available to coaches, parents, league organizers and others who will fire this movement. Read more about the Shipley and the Positive Coaching Alliance.

Shipley Athletics Choices

Upper School competitive team sports:
Fall – soccer, field hockey, tennis, cross country, crew
Winter – basketball, volleyball, squash, swimming
Spring – lacrosse, baseball, softball, tennis, crew, golf

Middle School competitive team sports:
Fall – soccer, field hockey, tennis, cross country
Winter – basketball, volleyball, squash, swimming
Spring – lacrosse, baseball, softball, tennis, golf

Upper School non-competitive athletics and physical education:
Strength conditioning
Student athletic trainers
Physical education/ fitness
Sports photojournalism