Primed to Compete: Coaching for Character

Sports can build character. But it doesn’t happen automatically. And good intentions are not enough. PRIMED to Compete: Coaching for Character is the definitive book for coaches who want to optimize young peoples’ experience of competition and promote their character, performance, and overall well-being.

This engaging new book brings cutting-edge research and practical sport experience together in an easily accessible and digestible framework. PRIMEDto Compete provides a powerful way for coaches to turn the challenges of competition into opportunities for promoting positive character.

The three authors bring together a century of expertise in professional and collegiate sports, youth coaching and coach education, and developmental and sport sciences. Building on Marvin W. Berkowitz’s highly acclaimed PRIMED model of character education and David Light Shields’ influential model of True Competition, PRIMEDto Compete offers a comprehensive, user-friendly guide to shaping sports environments that build healthy relationships, fair and collaborative mindsets, and core values and virtues. Rooted in science, it provides practical guidance for building team cultures that support both optimal sport performance and character growth across multiple dimensions.

David Light Shields, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus at St. Louis Community College where he was the Coordinator for their Teacher Education Program. He was the 2017 recipient of the prestigious Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Formerly, he was co-Director of the Mendelson Center for Sports, Character, and Community at the University of Notre Dame. For more than three decades he has been an internationally recognized researcher and scholar of sports and character/moral development. His work has been published in such diverse places as the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, the Journal of Positive Psychology, the Journal of Character Education, the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, the Harvard Business Review, Psychology Today, and Phi Delta Kappan. His recent work, building on his research with more than 10,000 high school and collegiate athletes, has focused on the psychosocial implications of athletes’ understandings of competitive processes.

Marvin W Berkowitz, Ph.D., is McDonnell Professor of Character Education, and Co-Director of the Center for Character and Citizenship, at UMSL. He directs the Leadership Academy in Character Education. Born in Queens NY, he earned his BA in psychology from the SUNY Buffalo, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Life-span Developmental Psychology at Wayne State University. He is founding co-editor of the Journal of Character Education. Dr. Berkowitz has received numerous honors, including the Sanford N. McDonnell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Character Education Partnership (2006), the Good Works Award (2010) and the Kuhmerker Career Award (2013) from the Association for Moral Education, and the University of Missouri System’s Thomas Jefferson Professorship (2011).

Pete S. Paciorek, Ed.D., is a worldwide leader in character in sport. He comes from a family of 11 professional athletes in MLB organizations. After his own ten-year career as a professional baseball player in the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres organizations, Pete committed his life’s mission to the cultivation of character in youth through the vehicle of sport. Pete has been a collegiate Director of Athletics, the head coach and lead instructor at the prestigious IMG Academy. Pete founded a non-profit organization, Character Loves Company, that is making a significant impact in the lives of youth. Pete was named the 2022 ＂Champion for Character in Sport＂ from the renowned Character.org for his leadership and vision. Over the past two decades, Pete has effectively coached and mentored thousands of athletes, coaches, and sport management professionals. He currently teaches graduate level courses in Sport Management at the University of Florida in Sport Ethics and Coaching for Character Literacy.