Payton Jordan, the legendary Stanford track and field coach, once said that “coaches are probably the best teachers you have in education.” Brendan Sullivan, who hadn’t even reached elementary school when Jordan retired, is keeping those words true today through his work at Headfirst.
Headfirst, a Washington, D.C., organization that Sullivan co-founded in 1996, offers coaching in baseball, soccer and athletic development for student-athletes from age 4 through high school. Instruction is based on the philosophy “that the playing field may serve as the best platform for some of life’s greatest lessons.” Sullivan, who appeared in three regional NCAA baseball tournaments and the 1995 College World Series with the Cardinal, started Headfirst with his brother Ted, who pitched for Duke, and Sean Flikke, ’96, another former Stanford baseball player.
The program grew out of pitching lessons Sullivan gave to “make money and keep busy” during the off-seasons of his five-year minor league career.
In addition to skills clinics, summer camps and athletic leagues, Headfirst has a strong focus on refining students’ academic skills and cultivating leadership. “We’ve been successful because we’ve injected the academic focus and some other stuff that puts some meat behind the program,” Sullivan says. “We prefer a base of how do we handle ourselves as a young person, thanking our mom and dad, looking someone in the eye, having as much respect for teammates as self. We feel like we can create coachable boys and girls by teaching them what it means to be a respectful young person first and then teaching them love of the game.
“The style of play we coach comes very much from what I was taught at Stanford,” Sullivan says. He has kept ties to the Farm by working with the Positive Coaching Alliance, based at Stanford, and last year he won one of six national awards the PCA gives to outstanding coaches.
Given Headfirst’s rapid growth, it might seem logical to move the program into other markets, but Sullivan hesitates to expand. “At one point,” he remembers, “I sort of thought Headfirst might pop up in Boston and Richmond and Atlanta, but coaching kids is not something you can mass produce. It takes care, training, having something close to us. I think our program may spread nationally, but if we expand too quickly, we won’t maintain the same emphasis on the off-the-field things.”
- MICHAEL ENDLER, '05
