Basketball making inroads at tiny Summerfield Waldorf

<p>Summerfield Waldorf School & Farm sometimes sounds less like a K-12 educational facility than a utopian colony.</p><p>It sits on a lovely, 38—acre biodynamic farm between Santa Rosa and Graton. The curriculum is heavily arts-based, and offers programs such as an after-school Circus Club that teaches children to ride a unicycle and swing on a trapeze. Like other Waldorf schools — which are structured on the teachings of Austrian-born philosopher and scientist Rudolph Steiner — Summerfield stresses harmony, creativity and spirituality. It has a distinct back-to-the-earth vibe. Families are urged to give up electronic media during grade-school years, and to limit TV to weekends even for high school students.</p><p>“The running joke, when you tell someone you go to a Waldorf school, they say, ‘Is that a cult?’” noted Brian Massey-Todd, a junior at Summerfield.</p><p>“Or Hogwarts,” added Keegan McAuliffe, a senior.</p><p>“Yeah. Like, ‘Do they teach magic there?’” chimed in senior Ken Boyd.</p><p>Basketball? Let’s just say it hasn’t traditionally been a point of emphasis.</p><p>“We went into the office this week, and no one knew we were the Mustangs. They don’t even know our team colors,” said McAuliffe, a 6-6 center for the, uh, Mustangs who wound up plagiarizing the Denver Broncos’ team logo to create some pep signs for his team.</p><p>But a funny thing is occurring in paradise. Over the past couple years, sports has slowly and unevenly begun to infiltrate the Summerfield mindset.</p><p>It started really with Massey-Todd’s father, Owen Massey. Massey embraces the Waldorf concept, but he also happens to be a big sports fan who has coached CYO softball and basketball. When Massey-Todd entered ninth grade, father and son became discouraged by the lack of athletic outlets.</p><p>Summerfield offers PE classes, but they aren’t what you would call intense. “We walked balance beams,” Boyd explained, a hint of disdain in his voice. “We’ve never been timed on a run. It’s pretty lax.”</p><p>The after-school sports program was disjointed. Massey-Todd remembers playing in “empty, dimly lit gyms” scattered all over Sonoma County.</p><p>Thanks largely to Massey’s lobbying, Summerfield hired an athletic director, Mike Carroll, two years ago. One of the coaches Carroll brought in was Jim Fagundes, who knew Carroll from El Molino and Massey-Todd from CYO ball. Fagundes has coached in the Empire for years, including five years with the El Mo girls’ varsity, a stint during which the Lions won the Sonoma County League title three times. He knows the game, and he quickly saw talent at Summerfield.</p><p>He also knew he was accepting a huge challenge. Summerfield plays in Div. VI, where all the schools — primarily religious institutions and other Waldorfs — are tiny. But even within that pool, it’s a pipsqueak. The Div. VI upper limit is 200 students. Summerfield has 93, the overwhelming majority girls. This year’s senior class has five boys; four are on the basketball team.</p><p>The total basketball roster is eight boys. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for foul trouble, or injuries, or poor conditioning, or disciplinary problems. “If you have someone with attitude or who is unhappy with their role, if you have 14 or 15 kids, it doesn’t matter,” Fagundes said. “You play someone else to teach them a lesson.”</p><p>Fagundes has no such luxury at Summerfield, and is grateful for committed kids who understand their responsibilities.</p><p>For the athletes, the biggest challenge is balancing obligations. Each Summerfield student must log 20 hours of community service outside of school. Everyone is required to be musical, whether that means singing in choir or playing an instrument. (No surprise: Tom Waits’ son Sullivan is on the basketball team.) Art and drama rule. Another way to look at it: Not many high school coaches have to go shorthanded for a week because one of their players is appearing in a production of “My Fair Lady.”</p><p>In Fagundes’ first season, the Mustangs went 12-11 and upset No. 1 seed Hanna Boys Center in the Small School Bridge League tournament. This year, paced by Boyd’s 22 points per game and McAuliffe’s 14, Summerfield went 22-7, a record that included preseason games against much bigger schools like Santa Rosa (an overtime loss), Richmond (a 20-point win) and Hogan of Vallejo.</p><p>They have built a following in the process. Boyd remembers 10 to 15 fans — pretty much all family — showing up for games when he was a sophomore. This year, Fagundes’ team routinely draws 150.</p><p>The Mustangs received a blessing last fall when the North Coast Section decided to add Div. VI playoffs. They enter as a No. 2 seed. After a first-round bye, they face San Francisco Waldorf at Sebastopol’s Brook Haven Middle School gym tonight. Brook Haven agreed to host Summerfield’s home games in exchange for a new scoreboard — another drive led by Massey.</p><p>The Mustangs’ success on the court may slow the migration of athletic kids. The school has produced its share of top athletes. But the serious ones often transfer to public schools when they hit high-school age and yearn for quality competition.</p><p>In fact, that’s what McAuliffe did — for four days. After his sophomore year, the Occidental resident transferred to El Molino. That summer, Summerfield hired Carroll and Fagundes. McAuliffe attended El Mo for four days, didn’t like it, saw the changes at his old school and transferred back on Friday of Week 1. </p><p>Changing the culture among administrators and teachers can be thornier.</p><p>“I recently got an e-mail from a teacher saying, ‘Would it be OK if one of your kids missed the game this Saturday?’ It was for a fundraiser,” Fagundes said. “And you’re talking about a North Coast Section playoff game. So that’s not getting it.”</p><p>As McAuliffe said: “It seems like sports, at least to me, is a really important part of a kid’s life, or a young adult’s life. And sometimes it seems like there’s no priority for sports here. Maybe Rudolph Steiner didn’t write it in his ... whatever.”</p><p>Yet everyone acknowledges the Waldorf advantages, even in an athletic context. The boys agree that their team exhibits the highest sportsmanship they’ve seen in competitive games. And Fagundes notices a basic difference between his Waldorf students and traditional public school kids.</p><p>“There is a maturity,” he said. “If I’m trying to organize something, I’ll get phone calls from the kids. They’ll take care of it themselves rather than have their parents do it.”</p><p>The Summerfield faculty and staff would be proud of that observation, and rightfully so. Just don’t expect all of them to show up at Brook Haven wearing red and white — which happen to be the team colors — tonight.</p><p>You can reach Staff Writer Phil Barber at 521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com.</p>