One of the more noticeable changes of the 2024-2025 school year is the cell phone policy. Like so many schools throughout the country, we took a proactive stance this year—requiring students to either place their phone in a caddy in the classroom or keep it in their backpack. Many teachers feared students would leave "burner" phones. Others worried that placing and picking up phones would diminish class time. However, I am happy to report students have readily complied with the new practice and expectations. Teenagers are still actively messaging on their iPads or laptops. Some abuse the policy by "going to the bathroom." This basic request is all too often a euphemism for "I need time to send and read text messages." Furthermore, the minute the bell rings, students either get out their phones or retrieve them from the caddy and log in and on. Too many are walking zombies. Who have we become? What have we become? I would like to suggest this is NOT just a question for teachers and students. In fact, it's worth considering as a nation and a society.
In Sports and Spirituality, I spend the first week establishing class norms, unpacking the syllabus, outlining expectations and listing the goals of the course. I do what I can to frame all of this as it relates to our classroom and the world at large. For example, the syllabus mentions that the classroom is a cell phone free zone. I explain why it is important that both phones and iPads are not out or open until instructed otherwise. If a student needs to use their phone, they should do so outside of the classroom and in the hallway. However, they need to be in their seat when the bell rings. Any student who is not in their seat when the bell rings is considered tardy.
School bell or not—being on time is important. Athletics speaks to this principle all the time and as written in NFL players often forget Rule No. 1: Show up on time, athletes struggle with it too. It says, "Back before he won the Super Bowls and was known more for his rules than his rings, Tom Coughlin had one directive that sounded so extreme, it was borderline comical: If you weren't five minutes early for a team meeting, you were late." Furthermore, if you're late for a team meeting you can be fined. In jest, I ask if I should employ this policy in class, too. And to whom should I donate the money—St. Anthony's foundation? This rule in associated with many others which carry a financial consequence agreed to through the CBA (Collective Bargaining Agreement). Professional athletes are just that: professionals. They are paid handsomely to do their job, but they are fined heavily when they don't.
For those students who find rules to be tedious or the school handbook too scrupulous, I mention that the late great John Wooden of UCLA basketball fame had but three rules.
- Be on time.
- Never criticize a teammate.
- Not one word of profanity.
Too many times to count, NBA coach Doc Rivers has seen cell phones get in the way of winning. Rivers tries to discourage players from checking statistics on their phones at halftime, because he doesn’t want them fixated on personal scoring. If a guy knows he shot 1-10 in the first half, it “might affect his play in the second half; make him overaggressive or, worse, hesitant, and either way ruin the team’s flow. Nevertheless, often when Rivers walks into the locker room to address his team at the break, what does he see? A lot of bent heads. Guys are staring down at the devices in their hands, checking their stats online. Not only that, they’re reading texts and tweets about their stats.
What is Rivers supposed to do? Ban all cell phones? Bench the worst offenders?Rivers has an aura of authority. He’s six-foot-four, the son of a cop, with a voice like truck wheels on gravel. He’s spent forty years in the NBA, first as a player and then as a winning head coach of four different franchises across the league. He led the Boston Celtics to an NBA title in 2008, set a franchise record for victories with the LA Clippers in 2014, and in 2020–2021 he turned the Philadelphia 76ers into a contender for the first time in 20 years.
Rivers’s no-stats philosophy was formed as a player, an All-Star for the Atlanta Hawks in the late 1980s. One night, Rivers went off for thirty-seven points. With two minutes left he had the team up by twenty, and he motioned to the sideline that he wanted to come out of the game and let a younger player clean up and get some experience. But his coach Bob Weiss wanted to leave him in.“You have a chance to get your career high,” Weiss said. Rivers thought about it for a moment, and replied, “So what?”Rivers fervently believes a player is better off not focusing on scoring, but on the elements that lead to teamwork, such as disciplined movement without the ball and sound defense. “If I had thirty-nine, I was going to be a better person?” Rivers asked rhetorically, telling the story years later. “To me, you do your job, and wherever you stop doing it, you stop doing it for the right reasons.”
Smartphones threaten to get in the way of those precepts. They are chock-full of distracting and mentally distorting material. Guys pick up their phones to check their numbers, and see a message from their agents telling them what they should do, as opposed to what their team needs them to do. Rivers calls the devices the Bad News Phones. He tells his assistant coaches, “Whatever news they’re getting on the phone, it’s not in our favor.”
“No one on those phones is telling them, ‘You should pass more,’” Rivers has observed.“No one is telling them the reason they’re not playing more is they don’t play defense hard enough.”But what is Rivers supposed to do about it? How is Rivers supposed to make players who “are seven feet tall and 280 pounds do anything they don’t want to do?" Even if Rivers could find an effective way to enforce the rule, it would likely be self-defeating, breeding buried resentment or resistance in his players, most of whom are grown men, some of them with children, and whose strong self-will Rivers prizes.At the end of the 2020 season, Rivers compared notes on the issue with Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr, during The Ringer network’s podcast series Flying Coach, in which bench leaders talk tradecraft. Kerr encountered the same cell phone–social media issue in his Golden State Warriors locker room. It was a daily challenge to secure the undivided concentration of young players for whom reaching for electronic devices had become a reflex.
“It’s interesting because you have to decide as a coach in the modern era, am I going to be the coach that says no phones?” Kerr said. “Am”“I going to be that guy? Like, the old-school guy: Hey! No phones!”The answer to the question in the case of Rivers and Kerr was no—they weren’t going to be that guy. “It’s just not realistic,” Kerr said. “I don’t think it would work these days.” Both men believed any coach who tried strong-arm attempts at enforcement would wind up with a roomful of malcontents, or doormats. Instead, they searched for ways to handle the problem with light suggestion or sarcasm. On one occasion Rivers walked into a locker room, saw a player jabbing at his phone, and cracked to him, “Tell her I said, ‘Hi.’ ” The teasing remark made it clear the texting was an intrusion, but it left self-determination intact. A murmur of laughter ran around the room, and players put their phones down—for once.That even the most authoritative coaches in the NBA struggle over whether to forbid social “media in their locker rooms says something important about discipline: it’s a perplexing subject and instilling it is tremendously difficult. There may be no concept more misunderstood, misconstrued, or misapplied by poor leaders, some of whom interpret it as strictness, to be imposed on others with penalty, punishment, or spittle-flying harangue. Only to find out that they’ve lost the room. Disney chairman Bob Iger observes, “Using the word is very dangerous in terms of how you treat or manage people.”Discipline is of course essential to good decision-making. Without it, a leader is left to sift through unreliable factors and behaviors in making choices, and the result is haphazardness, the quickest way to sabotage any endeavor. With shared discipline, uniform standards are set.
There is much to consider in from this real life report. It prompts questions we have already been considering such as To what degree do cell phones get in the way of winning? of community building?! Do Smartphones get in the way of precepts like personal records and stats are antithetical to the game? And what are the messages we are getting from our cell phones?
These are the very questions we must not only entertain but consider for ourselves to learn and love one another this school year. Putting the cell phone in the caddy or away in the backpack is just one small step in the right direction. While many thought it might not be possible, by and large it's been met with little resistance and hopefully more respect for how we interact and communicate with one another. Stay tuned... (do students know what that might mean?!)
