Coach Laws Featured in “6 Inspiring NoVA Teachers We Love.” “6 Inspiring NoVA Teachers We Love”

Whether he’s cheering on our athletes from the sidelines, coordinating schedules in his Hurd office, or reminding our community to “Rock the Red” during Community Meeting Time, Coach Tavis Laws is a consistent and encouraging presence on Madeira’s campus. 

We’re excited to share that Coach Laws was recently highlighted in Arlington Magazine in a feature titled “6 Inspiring NoVA Teachers We Love.” His responses are included below. 

Read the full article here. 

Tavis Laws

Director of Athletics
Years Teaching: 15

A former professional athlete (he played arena football for the Reading Express), Laws has spent nearly two decades as an athletic administrator, including seven years at Congressional School in Falls Church. In addition to his work at Madeira, he runs the Laws Elite Basketball Academy.

• No day is the same. As an athletic administrator, you can be in the weeds helping run a practice or a conditioning session, or you can be at the 30,000-foot level, where you’re strategically thinking about next steps.

• What motivates me? The kids. Knowing they’re gonna show up, regardless of what you have going on in your world. They’re going to be bright-eyed, with so much energy. They look to you to be that space where they can just release everything, whether it’s a conversation or just letting go of academic pressure and the conflicts of the day. They’re looking to you as their leader to make it a successful, happy, enjoyable experience.

• I love what I do. This is what I was put on earth to do: to really embrace and encourage athletes and coaches to do their personal best each and every day.

• I view athletics as a classroom—it just looks different. We don’t have desks, pencils or pens, but there are definitely lifelong lessons you can learn from athletics that you cannot learn in any other aspect of the educational process.

• The secret sauce is don’t ever degrade. Don’t ever raise your tone. Talk to them if they make a mistake: “I don’t care that you made a mistake. Get back out there.” It’s how you respond. That is the best way to truly get people to trust you, including athletes and coaches.

• Everyone needs to feel great about themselves, but be held accountable at the same time. I think I’ve done well maintaining that equal balance of push-pull—knowing when to push an athlete or coach, knowing when to pull back, knowing when they’re at a low moment, what they need at that time, because it is an art. Being an educator is an art.

• Just because someone fails doesn’t mean they are a failure. It means they’re growing. That’s what education is about. It’s about failing at something, recalculating, recalibrating and then finding a new way, or re-strategizing and moving forward. This notion has been lost a little bit—the fact that people don’t want their child to be in any discomfort. In most cases, failure is a positive thing. As long as there’s no harm done, failure is growth.

—Interview by Eliza Tebo 

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