One On One: Teaching Teenagers How to be Role Models

Falmouth High School Basketball players with kids from the Morse Pond Elementary School.
Photo courtesy of Joe Santos

There’s a funny, ironic thing about role role models.

Half of the people we think should be role models for kids aren’t half the people we perceive them to be, while on the other hand a great many role models exist as such yet rarely get

recognized for the great influence they have over young, burgeoning adults or kids who look up to them. How many “perceived” role models out there want absolutely nothing to do with that responsibility? How many people out there take on that responsibility and have absolutely no business influencing young folk?

Well, there’s one role model on Cape Cod whose every day business for the past 25 years has been to exert a positive influence on young people’s lives and I will be the first to admit I never looked at him as more than just another of the three- or four dozen high school basketball coaches I know or am acquainted with. From a distance, I always just thought he was a nice guy who happened to be very bright and very competitive when managing a high school basketball team.

I am likely not the first person to perceive him as infinitely more than that.

Falmouth High School boys’ varsity basketball coach Paul Lundberg has been doing what he does for over a quarter of a century but if you met him you’d have no idea that he’s been at something so worthwhile for so long. You’d be even harder pressed to figure out that along the way he’s also been an elementary school teacher in Falmouth and that from the very moment he started down this career path there’s been one immeasurably important thing he’s done that so few adults can say they have done and it has absolutely nothing to do with winning some long forgotten 32-minute game.

Falmouth High School basketball player Leo DeOliveira shares breakfast with kids at the Morse Pond Elementary School – some of his pen pals.
Photo courtesy of Joe Santos

He’s spent the last quarter century teaching kids how to be role models themselves and I can honestly say that I’m not so sure I’ve ever met anyone who actually did that. He actually teaches the adolescent boys he coaches how to be better people in the community and how to exert their influence over young people in a positive and lasting way.

You see, about 25 years ago, Coach Lundberg established a Pen Pals program with his Falmouth High basketball players, where, in brief, the players correspond with the kids in Lundberg’s Morse Pond School fifth grade students and over time develop a sort of Big Brother/Big Sister rapport with each one of them. Eventually, one by one, the players come into the classroom and engage with their Pen Pals, do projects with them, talk about their lives, all sorts of little things so many of us take for granted as not being worthy of our precious “time.” In a day and age when so many of our youth are viewed through a not so rosy-colored lens, how can we not view these young adults as being anything less than magnificent examples of what we all hope our teenagers will be?

What Lundberg achieves by immersing his student-athletes into this likely unexpected role when they make it through tryouts and are selected to play basketball for Falmouth High, is he gives them an infinite number of additional reasons to want to succeed. These little elementary school kids literally look up at these young adults as if they were god-like in every imaginable way. In a society when so few homes have two parents on hand and even then can be replete with struggles no child should experience, these basketball players become like surrogate, collective shoulders to lean on. They become, with the stroke of a computer keyboard and a “print” key, an icon of inspiration.

Lundberg doesn’t just stop with the letter-writing between his players and the little kids in his fifth grade classroom. He has parents or guardians bring the kids to Falmouth basketball games and he gives them T-shirts all emblazoned on the back with Lundberg’s 20-year-old Clipper slogan “Play Hard.”

The kids watch movies with the players. Share pizzas. Anything that will help foster the idea in a child’s head that these young adults are the type of person they want to emulate and aspire to be like.

Falmouth kids enjoy a recent Falmouth-Nauset high school basketball game.
Sean Walsh/capecod.com sports

“I try to help the players make a connection with the kids,” Lundberg told me one recent afternoon. “I try to get the kids to believe that hey, I can do it, too.”

To be frank, there is something almost palpably different about walking into virtually any of the Cape’s high school basketball gymnasiums on game night versus when you sit in the crowd at one of Lundberg’s Clipper games. I marveled at the sheer multitude of little kids that were in attendance at a recent game I attended at Falmouth High. I found it exceptionally striking to watch grandpa’s toting toddlers down courtside and just the sheer demographic differences between that game versus any of the other three dozen games I’ve taken in this winter already.

On the one hand, it’s as if this high school basketball coach is nothing short of pure marketing genius, but when I sort of touched upon that as one of many perceptions I had of this program I realized – with humility – that it was simply an ancillary benefit of a man trying to teach young adults how to be around little kids. The idea was lost upon him, but in a very good way. There’s no ulterior motive here. There are no snack bar dollars to be counted. Paul Lundberg doesn’t have to use this program or its manifold scenarios as a savvy recruiting tool for the Clipper basketball program. His idea is about as simple and genuine and from the heart as any I’ve been given an insight to and its worthiness simply cannot be deconstructed or analyzed.

It’s people like Lundberg who are the role models society should be worshiping and steering their children to, but just as importantly, and as innocuous and plain as Lundberg’s Pen Pals program is, it’s the precise type of thing that gives one hope for a future not just for an ever-changing group of basketball players, but for all of us.

— Sean Walsh’s column One On One appears weekly at capecod.com. His email is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @coachwalshccbm.