Perhaps it is easiest to start with an excerpt from the Original Play website: “Original Play is a physiological and psychological process. It is not a cognitive exercise but instead combines cognitive, affective and sensory-motor learning processes. Therefore, to fully understand Original Play requires that you experience it rather than simply talk about it.”
Naturally, then, New York Family Sports talked about it. Over the phone, across several time zones.
Speaking from Stockholm, Sweden was Original Play founder Fred Donaldson. He splits his time between Sweden and Trumbull, Conn., promoting the trademarked concept called Original Play. Competition is not really his thing, as Donaldson—a former college geography professor—strives for a world where there are no losers. Vince Lombardi he is not.
How did you arrive at the name “Original Play”? It didn’t occur to me for awhile because I didn’t really know what I was doing when I started this. I wasn’t trained to be with kids. I was a college professor. I have a master’s PhD in geography, and for a number of reasons ended up being with young children and began to learn from them what they thought play was, rather than what I thought it was. Over years of playing with kids in the United States and Mexico and all kinds of kids—this began in California—I got the idea that they were teaching me something that seemed more profound than I can imagine, and I wondered if the patterns that I felt from the kids were more general than I expected. So I began to play with wild animals to see if the patterns were broader in scope than just with kids. I first played with wolves, and the wolves played the same way the kids played. After wolves I played with wild dolphins. Then I lived in the Rockies and played with grizzly bears and black bears, deer, elk.
Is there an element of danger in that kind of interaction? Well, you certainly have to know what you’re doing. I never would have even imagined doing that had I not had years of practice with children because they actually taught me. There are many sages in the world, including Jesus, Buddha and Gandhi who have said in one way or another that children are important, that they have something to teach us. It was as if I took that to heart and wanted to find out was it true, and if it’s true, what is it? So after all the playing with animals and kids, it occurred to me there are two kinds of play in the world. One is cultural, and that’s what adults teach kids. All cultures do it. It is how we make children into who we are, so we perpetuate the values, standards and practices we think in a given culture are appropriate, and we present those to children in what we call play—games, sports, activities and so on. That wasn’t what the kids were teaching me. What they were teaching me had nothing to do with culture. Had nothing to do with games or sports. And it occurred to me that what they were teaching me came with life. So I used the term “original” to point to the fact that the play I was learning from kids and animals was a gift from creation, that it was original to life. We all have the skills when we’re born. So it is kind of original equipment, so to speak.
Do you have a target audience for Original Play? No, not really. Certainly there audiences that are more ready and see the uses more easily. For example, I work a lot with schools and organizations that have problems with bullying, with violence, with gangs, with cultural and special needs integration of children. Wherever there are differences among children that create problems—whether they are social or physical problems—I often am called to help solve those issues. And that’s all around the world. For example, the issue of bullying is very common in America and all over Europe, and adults essentially don’t know what to do about it. What I do is a process that provides an alternative to the whole structure of bullying. I have worked for corporations, for sports groups and whether I am working with little kids in schools, gang members, corporations or sports teams, the principles are always the same: any energy that a human being devotes to defending themselves can’t be used for creativity and learning. So what we want to do is provide a situation and safety for human beings so that their energy isn’t drained off in physical, emotional and intellectual self-defense and that energy can be used for creativity and learning. Whether that learning happens to be in a corporation, a classroom or a sports field doesn’t really matter.
How important is the setting for Original Play? Urban versus rural schools comes to mind. I’ve worked with gangs in New York City and Los Angeles and I’ve worked with schools in Montana. Obviously, we think of the problems as a lot more extreme and intense in New York City and Los Angeles than we do in Montana, but when you get right down to the individual level, a child in Montana can be feeling the negative effects of bullying because perhaps they are Native American, or are too heavy or come from a foreign country—all those things can isolate a child. And the impact can be such that it is very difficult for them to learn—all their energy is used in defending themselves. You can have the same kinds of experiences on an athletic team. The focus would be on creating relationships on that team so that members’ creativity and expertise isn’t drained off because they’re afraid of each other.
So Original Play can mesh with athletic endeavors ? You can use it. There’s a paradox in it that one has to be able to feel. In order to be better at your skill, you have to give up the intention of being better, and the very act of giving up the intention allows you to get better. For many Americans, that seems very strange.
We constantly hear coaches who talk about how conflicts and rivalries are good for athletes and kids because it “builds character.” How do you answer to that particular mindset? Well, it really doesn’t. It builds losers. And it builds people who think they can’t do anything well unless there are losers. If my character is dependent upon having somebody lose, well, what happens if there are no losers around? What happens to my character? Is my life devoted to being the garbage for someone else’s character? The way we build most sports is you have to have losers. Nobody wants to be a loser. We have assumed that is the only choice we have, and that is simply not true. We have accepted that as a fact when in reality it is not a fact—it is just a matter of cultural history. We can do so much better as human beings whether the endeavors are intellectual, athletic, physical or emotional because the same arguments that say the conflicts of sport build character are used for war.
What is your take on youth sports in America right now? Do you think we are at a good place or are we simply a sports-crazed nation or what? In general I would call it a contest-crazed nation. Sports are part of that, but certainly not the only part it, because the same contests exist within the schools in the academic part of school life as well as the sports part of school life and the emotional part of school life—all of the cliques that kids organize and create are just another aspect of the same contest behavior.
Do you have a specific example of Original Play, such as an actual interaction when you’re out there in, say, Montana? Is there a step-by-step description of getting the results you wanted? What comes to mind quickly is an example of a gang member from East L.A. I was called by a counselor to a school to work with eight 13-year-olds. All gang members. It was June, they’d been hanging out all year and they really hadn’t been going to class and the counselor said, “Fred, do something with them.” So I came in the room where they were and I put down on the floor a whole mess of photographs of me playing with wolves. The boys looked and said, “Hey, that’s you playing with those dogs.” I said, “Those aren’t dogs, those are wolves.” They didn’t believe that. One of them said, “How do you do that?” I said, “Come here, I’ll show you.” So I took him out on the grass by the school and I got down on my hands and knees and started crawling around and bumping their legs and pushing them and at first they didn’t know what the heck I was doing. They’d never seen an adult man do this. But eventually they got the idea, and one by one they started jumping me and rolling around and playing. So I came back for 10 weeks, for three hours every Friday, to play with these eight guys. And about the third week, the counselor called me and said Fred I want to tell you that Jose, one of the boys, doesn’t come to my office anymore, so she was worried about him. So she called up and said, “Jose, where are you?” And he said, “I’m in class.” And she said, “What are you doing there, you’ve never been there?” And he said, “Well, I’ve listened to what Fred said about playing with wolves, and I realized in playing with him that I didn’t need to get into a fight with my teacher.” So he ended up staying in class. Now Jose, up to that point, had never taken responsibility for himself in regards to school. Everybody else was at fault—teachers were at fault, mom was at fault. Everybody. Once he took responsibility, he didn’t blame the teacher anymore.
Have you been in demand lately, doing lots of presentations? I travel somewhere in the world every week. The level of physical violence and physical aggression is enormous among children of the world. And adults really don’t know what to do about that. We see models of it in our sports and it seems okay. I grew up in Detroit, Mich., and I played high school football and I played hockey. My parents would never—nor would the neighborhood—allow me to go on the street and hit people with a stick. But if I put skates on my feet, I could hit people with sticks. And not only did they not think it was bad, people applauded it. We have a really strange notion that we as adults pass down to children about aggression and sport. And we’re confused about it.
So you grew up in a real football culture. Do you watch the Ohio State-Michigan game? If I’m in the United States, yes. I went to Wayne State University. As a kid, Michigan was my dream. Michigan was my favorite football team in the country.
Anything you would like to add? It’s not so much that I am against sports. I think we can take the idea of excelling and physical activity and do it to even higher degrees so that everyone succeeds and nobody fails. We are intelligent enough to figure that out. That we don’t need losers.
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For more info, go to www.originalplay.com
