BGGA Admissions Guide 2018 | Page 25

.................................................................................................... ADMISSIONS 2018 CHARACTER IN ACTION PROGRAM BGGA is tasked with helping students from a wide variety of cultures and religions to be upstanding young adults, leaders in their community and society, and to be ready for college and the ‘real world’. We do this on a day-to-day basis through the life lessons we teach our student-athletes through golf and education, but we also enhance character through a program we call Character in Action or CIA. In these sessions, we take a character trait such as integrity, honesty, loyalty or accountability, tie the attribute to a golf specific component and present this to the students. In this manner the students are inadvertently involved in a cooperative learning environment, which has been shown to be very effective. An example of one of our topics is integrity, obviously a valuable trait to have in life. Our golf specific theme might be the rules of golf. All students need to familiarize themselves with the rules periodically. Even though the stakes are higher, you often see PGA tour players call for rules officials since they might not be familiar with a particular rule. When there aren’t rules officials everywhere in a junior tournament, it is crucial to know the rules so it doesn’t cost you strokes, or even worse, cost you the tournament. In conjunction with that, players have the responsibility to the game of golf to hold themselves and other competitors accountable when they break the rules. They also have the responsibility to protect the field who are playing by the rules. We then tie that into the concept of integrity and how having good integrity helps you on the course but also for the rest of your life, and we provide more real life examples. Character in Action is a very important part of BGGA. It’s rewarding for the students and the coaches, who see students come in as children and leave us as mature young adults. SOCIAL IMPACT BGGA assists students to fulfill their social responsibility projects Montverde Academy requires. BGGA students offer support to communities, both locally and globally, and learn from those experiences and carry that knowledge forward. For many of our students, volunteerism and community service becomes a main focus, even extending into their college years later. 25 25