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WCCO TV News interview 11/19/21 with Susan Elizabeth Littlefield

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Brooklyn Park father of two shifts focus from golf course to classrooms, encouraging kids to be nice

Bryan Skavnak is founder of Be the Nice Kid, a business venture that engages students in storytelling and activities designed to build character, courage and compassion.

Bryan Skavnak turned golf professional right out of college in 2000. But the Brooklyn Park father of two tweens quickly realized competition wasn't his thing. Kindness was.

Now he's taking lessons learned on the course into the classroom.

Skavnak, 43, is founder of Be the Nice Kid, a business venture that engages students in storytelling and activities designed to build character, courage and compassion. He meets kids where they are, figuratively, and literally, in assemblies, lunchrooms — even during recess. He shares stories of his own childhood as a quiet kid who got picked on occasionally and of his realization after decades of playing golf that there will always be people who are better, smarter, cooler.

But everybody can be patient. Honest. Nice.

While Be The Nice Kid launched about 10 years ago, Skavnak said his message is more urgent than ever, due to the pandemic and the isolation it's created.

"Kids haven't had a normal school year in one-and-a-half years," he said. "It's still not normal yet. A lot of kids just don't know how to interact. We talk a lot about that. You've got to think about other people. We talk a lot about patience — you're not going to get this right right away."

Skavnak graduated from St. John's University in 2000 and turned golf pro that fall. The author of "Happy Golf Starts Here" also began teaching golf to kids through a rec program in Plymouth, which he's still doing in the summer.

The turning point for Skavnak was 2011, when his mother died from lymphoma. "All of a sudden, there were things way more important than golf," he said.

That fall, as his summer golf students returned to school, he penned a note to them: "Yes, we had fun this summer but now you're going back to school. Be the nice kid through everything."

He posted a longer quote on his website (bethenicekid.com) sharing that sentiment and didn't think anything of it. But the quote "exploded" on Facebook, he said. Suddenly, his words were on posters hanging in thousands of school gyms and classrooms.

"It was weird," Skavnak said. "This letter just kind of started the be-the-nice-kid revolution."

After a COVID pandemic hiatus in 2020, Skavnak held 120 virtual assemblies last spring. He's now back traveling to schools across Minnesota and the country, from California to Texas to Massachusetts. In recent weeks, he was in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

He still wears a mask in many settings, only taking it off to speak.

He brings both his free and paid talks to students in kindergarten through middle school, modifying his content to their varying attention spans. One overall favorite story, though, is "how I lost to a chicken in tic tac toe," he said. "That's the one the kids always remember."

File that one under lessons in humility.

Donna Spingler, a third-grade teacher in Norristown, Pa., said Skavnak "was just what we needed as we kicked off our schoolwide Kindness Campaign for the 2021-2022 school year."

She said she spotted Skavnak's "Be the Nice Kid" poem on social media a few years ago and now recites it with her students every morning. During his visit to the school in September, Skavnak brought his message to students from pre-K to 8th grade, she said, "connecting with all of them."

More than a month later, her students still remember his lessons — "things such as, say hi, give a compliment, don't be a sore loser, include everyone always and try to say kind things every day.

"He is a very kind person," Spingler said, "so people can see that he is what he speaks."

An exciting new project for Skavnak is a book collaboration with Twin Cities illustrator and mixed media artist Wendy Kieffer Shragg; the two were introduced through a mutual friend.

Titled "Be Nice. The End: Simple Wisdom of the Playground Kids," the coffee table book (meettheplayground kids.com) features Shragg's images of children coupled with Skavnak's words about kindness, acceptance, courage, perseverance and more.

Shragg calls the merging of her images with his words "a perfect match." Like Skavnak, her work reflects the complexities, and sometimes pain, of growing up.

"They're not all happy, smiling," she said of her illustrations. "Most have a soulful feel to them. That's the beauty of them. There's something deeper. They're not just cute kids on a playground."

She shares Skavnak's sense of urgency in reaching kids as they return to a still-uncertain school year.

"This is information especially important to be hearing now," she said. "Do we even remember how to treat each other? How do we retrain ourselves in a way that feels better than before?

"We hope this book can help guide the way."

Skavnak, too, is hopeful that his be-kind message is resonating.

"I've seen it. I've seen kids standing up and being upstanders and even better kids. They're more tolerant, more patient.

They're even, he said, "more willing to wait in line."

Gail Rosenblum • 612-673-7350. @grosenblum

Sun Sailor

Wayzata artist, Brooklyn Park writer team up for new book

• Jason Jenkins

• Oct 7, 2021

‘Be Nice. The End. Simple Wisdom of the Playground Kids’ is available now

An unlikely pairing between two strangers has produced a book about the virtue of being kind.

Wayzata artist Wendy Shragg first heard about Bryan Skavnak, a youth golf coach and motivational speaker/writer living in Brooklyn Park, from a mutual friend. After checking out his @BeTheNiceKid Instagram feed and learning about his Be the Nice Kid program, Shragg grew even more curious.

“How does somebody who’s a golf teacher end up with an Instagram feed with all these followers? What’s the magic potion?” Shragg wondered. “And so I reached out to him. We had a nice conversation and at the end just kind of left things open.”

A few months later in May 2020, Shragg woke up one day with an idea: To use her drawings and Skavnak’s words to write a book centered on the virtue of kindness and compassion.

“I said, let’s do it. I’m in,” Skavnak said. “It was an easy answer.”

“We both really had the same vision for this book, which was wonderful,” Shragg said.

Through the many months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the pair collaborated virtually over FaceTime. Together they developed a 144-page exploration of the playground as a microcosm of the world – all told through the wisdom of kids as they interact, try to get along and search to find a place to belong. Messages on inclusion, empathy, acceptance, perseverance, perspective and kindness make up the book, which is called “Be Nice. The End. Simple Wisdom of the Playground Kids.”

Skavnak said he hopes the book will demonstrate to readers of all ages the importance of being kind to one another. The message is brought to life by Shragg’s illustrations, each one depicting a unique child.

For Shragg, who had primarily worked in abstract and mixed-media art, it comes as a surprise that she would help put together a book comprised of illustrated faces. As an artist, she had long avoided trying to depict faces out of fear they would be judged as inaccurate. But in 2018, as part of #The100DayProject on Instagram, Shragg challenged herself to share posts of her work for 100 days. By day 34, she wanted to share something completely new: A young fictional friend that would become the introduction to her “Playground Kids” series.

“I got a lot of comments on it, and the next day I posted another and I just continued. ... They came from a place deep within my heart,” the artist said. “They each have a story.”

When developing the book, Shragg would send a sheet of illustrations to Skavnak so they could try to match each message with one of the “Playground Kids.”

“The book itself isn’t a story book. ... It’s more meant to be a coffee table book,” Shragg said. “It’s meant to be enjoyed on lots of different levels: As a piece of art, as a learning tool and as an opening for discussion. ... And it’s not something that is just for kids. This is definitely for everybody.”

For Skavnak, the book is one more way to share the positive and inspirational messages that he had already been bringing to classrooms and school assemblies with his Be the Nice Kid program.

“(The book is meant to) show people that it’s not a difficult thing to be kind to each other. Sometimes people just need a little push along the way to do it,” Skavnak said. “You can be a lot of different things, but kindness has to be part of that thing too.”

To learn more and to purchase the book, visit MeetThePlaygroundKids.com.

TC Jewfolk

Lonny Goldsmith, October 20, 2021

How A New Book Inspires Kindness With Simple Messages

Wendy Shragg had no reason to meet local golf pro Bryan Skavnak in early 2020. But when a mutual friend mentioned that Shragg should check out Skavnak’s uplifting Instagram feed Be The Nice Kid, it laid the foundation for a project that recently came to fruition.

Shragg, a “multi-passionate creative” who works in multiple mediums, provided the illustrations to Skavnak’s words in the new book Be Nice. The End: simple wisdom of the Playground Kids. 

“When we (first) talked, it was a very easy conversation,” Shragg said of that first meeting. “I wasn’t thinking about matching images and verbiage. It was about organically growing an Instagram presence.”

In the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns, Shragg said she felt herself getting frustrated. But then she thought of the people who suggested that she write a story about the Playground Kids, the line of children she drew as part of 2018’s #The100DaysProject on Instagram. Skavnak was sharing posts about kindness, acceptance, and courage, so she reached out to him to see if he’d want to get involved in the project.

“He said ‘heck yeah!’” she said.

However, being COVID-responsible, the two didn’t meet in person until three weeks ago — despite working on a book project together for nearly 18 months.

“In the beginning, two or three times a week we met on the phone,” but it came together so beautifully. It was a perfect match,” she said. “We cut out the pictures and his words, and laid them on a table, and moved them around to see what message was best from which kid.”

Shragg said she and Skavnak went into the project with the same vision, which lead to a harmonious partnership.

“It was so seamless, so enjoyable. The two of us had the same vision and it just came together almost effortlessly,” she said. “It was a relationship that felt like it had been going on forever. I feel like we’ve known each other all our lives.”

The Playground Kids, Shragg said, were created without anybody in particular in mind. 

“They truly are a work from my heart, and there’s a certain spark when I draw their eyes,” she said. “I can almost hear them speak to me, there’s just this inner-knowing that they have, they’re wiser than any of us. It’s that unhampered innocence of childhood.”

Skavnak’s words are the simple lessons that many of us learned — or should have learned — early on, like “Be the kid who helps when no one is looking,” or “Maybe you can’t. But what if you can?”

Some of the lessons are even more important now, especially as kids spent so much time away from each other during the pandemic.

“How are we kind and accepting of one another?” she said. “Kids have been out for so long; did they forget how to act? Everything you needed to learn, you learned in kindergarten, it’s that basic. It’s that innocence of childhood. And there’s a beauty in that.”