From the court to the classroom: coaching pedagogy, the PASS framework, and academic-athletic transfer for African American male middle school students

Sport-integrated schooling is widely theorized as a vehicle for engaging African American male adolescents, yet the pedagogical mechanisms through which athletic culture becomes academic engagement remain underexamined, particularly in the middle grades. This general qualitative study examines how coaching practices and the Promoting Achievement in School through Sports (PASS) framework operate as instruments of transfer within a sports-centric middle school academy in northern New Jersey. The academy embeds basketball within the instructional day and conditions athletic participation on academic and behavioral standards, making it a plus-sport model; the analytic focus is narrowed to its African American male students aged 11-14. Twelve semi-structured interviews with four participants across three stakeholder groups were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Coaching routines familiar from the athletic domain, iterative goal setting, immediate formative feedback, reflective debriefing, and relational accountability, were deliberately re-deployed as classroom pedagogy, and students recognized and generalized them across domains. The study also documents the uneven distribution of these benefits: accounts of conditional regard and delayed staff communication indicate that the motivational architecture operated aspirationally rather than uniformly, and that where relational consistency lapsed, accountability reverted toward the punitive dynamics it was designed to transcend. The article specifies what coaching adds to practices otherwise familiar to skilled teachers and offers considerations for equity-centered adaptation.