About

D.C. Athletics Club has grown since 2009 from five 4 year olds and a bag of sports equipment on Sunday mornings at 8am. As our group has grown to include more kids, opportunities to develop a young person of character through athletic challenge, perseverance, humbleness, tenacity, sportsmanship and comradery have corollarily emerged. While we hope to create winning and top notch athletes by providing in a fun and diverse environment, DCA also aims to deliver a person that will make the most of their talents, strive for quality self- improvement and pursue technical perfection, hand in hand with adopting the values of teamwork and good sportsmanship as part of their lives.

DC Athletics Mission

D.C. Athletics Club is a city centric athletics club. Our philosophy of “curricularized” training offered in multiple sports solidifies the habits of the person (child) underlying each athlete. The academy style is devoted and structured to help young athletes prepare for the “Next Level” transitions throughout their life . Our foundational belief is that by helping a child develop and pursue actualization in one or more sports you enable the ability for engagement and success in any other area of their life.

As with the arts, sports can be a ripe environment, because kids are engaged, to develop “winning” habits. Success in any area of endeavor demands effort, high work rate, consistent self-improvement and a commitment to the discipline. This is doubly true in team endeavors individual focus and improvement is essential to team progress. DCA encourages multisport participation to promote balanced physical and emotional development of the child. It also increases the probability that each child finds “their sport.” More importantly, the search itself builds training and improvement habits required in every thing, and that carries over to life pursuits.

Rather than preparing them to simply survive the next level experience. DCA’s aim is to empower them to thrive in all such “next level” transitions life will bring. We do so by teaching them to develop the self-investment, commitment to skill development, training habits, executive skills needed to progress in any rigorous endeavor, be it sports or advanced academic pursuits. The skills, habits, and technique transfer to engaged performance much like a dancer posture, batters hand-eye or soccer player’s endurance and work rate.

As mentioned earlier, the club focus is on the foundational athlete that becomes the soccer player, basketball player, and/or the lacrosse player, and by extension the student. DCA programs look to instill a methodical pursuit of even casual interests through discipline and purpose by investing the time and effort in themselves and to bring deep effort and high work rate to every pursuit. To grow the athlete in a determined approach to all things based on empowered engagement be it sports and other interests such as playing soccer, basketball, golf, lacrosse, academics, track and field, dance, music, and tennis that hopefully carry over to academics.

The benefits of youth sports have been well documented: better grade point averages, better test scores, better attendance records, less discipline referrals, better self-discipline, lower dropout rates, higher graduation rates as well as more overall satisfaction for young people with their lives and feelings of better health.

The young athlete’s growth and actualization includes physical, emotional, physiological, academic, problem solving, conflict resolution, self-discipline, self-confidence, conflict resolution, and work ethic that will transfer to the passions of their youth to the eventual focus of their efforts in young adult hood, becoming a part of their approach to the world. The connection between training, commitment, team building and incremental improvement is what we hope to “win”.

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1 “High School Athletes Outperform Nonathletes Again by Wide Margins In Massive Statewide Academic Study: 7 Criteria Used Form Comparison by ECU Doctoral Candidate Gary Overton”, North Carolina High School Athletic Association Buuetin, Vol. 54, No. 1, Fall 2001.
2 Keith J. Zullig, Rebecca J. White. Physical Activity, Life Satisfaction, and Self-Rated Health of Middle School Students. Applied Research in Quality of Life, 2010.