How one Miami teacher and her classes are using the Dolphins’ journey for lessons

It’s the first day of school back from Christmas Break, and 20 students file into a classroom a little past noon at Pinecrest Elementary on Monday.

As the students get situated at their desks, Mary Martinez takes her spot in front of the classroom and next to a whiteboard. Various whiteboards contain lesson plans and agendas for the class but this one is different.

The Miami Dolphins’ 17-game regular-season schedule — with the outcome of each matchup except for the final three — is listed. Next to the schedule is star wide receiver Tyreek Hill’s receiving yards, how many he needs to reach 2,000 yards and the average receiving yards needed to reach the mark. Below that, cornerback Jalen Ramsey’s interception total is listed.

“Class class!” Martinez, a third-grade reading and language arts teacher, calls in a sing-song voice to grab the students’ attention.

For the next 20 minutes, she and the class go over the outcomes of the Dolphins’ final three games, as well as track the progress of Hill and Ramsey. Students interject their thoughts on the team while they were on holiday break, and Martinez guides them through recaps of the game and big-picture applications.

For the last four months, Martinez, 30, and her two classes have tracked the progress of the Dolphins, who will face the Kansas City Chiefs on the road Saturday night in the wild-card round of the NFL playoffs.

This has led to weekly updates after each game and looking at season-long stats from some of the best players on the team.

‘Born to do it’

The endeavor was born from a lifelong passion for sports and teaching for Martinez, a Palmetto Bay native who grew up a Dolphins fan.

“I think I was born to do it, I guess,” she said.

Her family had season tickets for UM football, but the Dolphins were the top priority.

“That was our Sundays, getting Pub Subs and watching Dolphins games,” she said.

Martinez’s mother was a fifth-grade teacher at Palmetto Elementary and found a unique way to incorporate sports into her lessons. She had an NFL program in which each student “drafted” a team and tracked it — geography, how many miles they travel, etc. — throughout the season.

“I used to want to be in her class so bad,” she said. “I have friends that are still diehard Chargers fans because they drafted that team in her class.”

Martinez had dreams of working in sports, possibly as a dietitian for the Dolphins. But “I took chemistry, I was like, ‘no, I’m not,’” she recalled.

She graduated from Florida State University and after one year teaching in the New England area, she returned home to teach kindergarten.

Last year was Martinez’s first teaching in third grade and first bringing sports into her lessons. She would write the schedule on the whiteboard as a way to connect with the various football fans in the class. Across Martinez’s room is a litany of Dolphins and other sports-related paraphernalia.

Most of the students in Martinez’s class are Dolphins fans, but one with another allegiance sticks out. She has Bills-themed socks to celebrate Buffalo’s Week 18 win over Miami which clinched the AFC East.

This season, Martinez’s class has used math skills to not only track Hill’s pursuit of the NFL’s first 2,000-yard receiving season but also predict how many yards he might record in a game. Students who correctly predict his yardage receive a pass that gets them out of homework one day; Martinez has given out four this season.

“People do this for a living and they still can’t get it,” said Martinez, the 2021 runner-up for the Miami-Dade rookie teacher of the year award.

Life lessons

When Martinez first started the activity last year, a Dolphins win would mean extra recess time. But when Miami went through its first losing streak of the season, Martinez approached the weekly recaps differently.

She noticed how second-year coach Mike McDaniel spoke in the aftermath of defeats, connecting losses to real life and as a way to use adversity as an opportunity, the team’s mantra. Martinez began doing the same for her class.

“I didn’t just want to throw up an ‘L’ and be like, ‘All right, moving on,’” she said. “I need to teach them to have a backbone and to teach them that they’re going to fail sometimes, they’re going to lose, they’re going to hit rock bottom, but it’s OK.”

As the class calculated Hill’s receiving yardage in the final three games, seeing that his NFL-leading 1,799 yards fell short of his 2,000-yard goal, the students responded with a loud groan.

“Shoot for the moon, and you might land in the stars,” she reassures her students.

‘Turned into something so much bigger’

What started as a fun way to connect with her students has taken on a life of its own. Martinez’s videos have gone viral on social media and attracted the attention of several players. Ramsey responded on X (formerly known as Twitter) to a post showing the class tracking his interception total.

The Dolphins’ social media team also made a video with outside linebacker Bradley Chubb thanking Martinez for her work and the team invited Martinez to a game. The New York Jets even surprised one of her students with a signed football and an invitation to a Dolphins-Jets game at Hard Rock Stadium. And HBO featured her class in an episode of “Hard Knocks,” which gives an in-depth look at the team.

“The way that it’s turned into something so much bigger, it’s all them,” said Martinez, who started a position as a social media coordinator for Pro Football Network this season. “I mean, I just stand up there and preach, but they’re the ones that have invested in it and it’s crazy to see how many different levels they’ve connected with it.”

“It’s something new that I’ve never seen before,” Hill told the Miami Herald. “To me, I think it’s a creative way to get the kids involved in learning. It’s definitely a cool concept because kids watch sports and a lot of us are role models for them. So, if you can find a way to keep them involved by using us, I think it’s a cool concept.”

As Martinez’s class was coming to an end, she took a dry-erase marker and began to wipe off the Dolphins’ schedule, which left only a Chiefs flag on the whiteboard. It’s now time for recess and the students gather into a line before heading outside.

“I’d do anything to go to Kansas City,” one excited student says.

“You just want to see Taylor Swift,” another student responds, referring to the pop star who is dating Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.

When the students return to class next week, the Dolphins will have pulled off a first-round upset in frigid conditions and advanced to the divisional round or their season will have come to an end. Regardless of the outcome, Martinez wants to continue the sports-adjacent lessons throughout the postseason.

“There’s just so many ways to tie it back into what they’re doing,” Martinez said.