Excerpts and Bonus material from Volume 3 No. 8: Teaching Children

Pages 14-19

Kids on the Court

A New Brand of Alexandered Tennis

What began for Alexander teacher Joe Boland as an inquiry into the applicability of the Alexander Technique to tennis, turned into a quest to not only educate himself from the ground up on the game of tennis, but also emerged, totally unexpectedly, as a completely new paradigm for teaching children.

In his words,

“…the bottom line to what I was doing was that I was enabling the kids to learn the difference between efficient movement and misuse and how to choose efficient movement whenever they wanted to choose that…that to me is the essence of Alexander’s work. I just happend to be using tennis as a movement format in order to be able to accomplish that.

What became the core to the whole process for me was really the first 15 or 20 minutes of instruction time of any given class because that’s where the real conditioning and instruction took place. The objective is, simply, to enable them to have an experience of efficient, balanced movement, to understand how they achieved it, and how to independently replicate it.

… I've had a few athletically adept students over the years, but the majority of my students were destined to be casualties of the physical education system, denied a legitimate opportunity while young to discover, explore, and revel in the pleasure, awareness, and intelligence of a balanced and coordinated being.

And what I discovered, quite by accident, is that there is already a bridge in place between Alexander teachers and kids. It's called sports and I enthusiastically encourage more Alexander teachers to cross that bridge.”

Audio Interview with Joseph Boland
Recorded 9th March, 2010

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