A former collegiate basketball player and accomplished all-around athlete, Kevin O’Connell can hardly be expected to understand the singular misery of those wall-bracing kids for whom gym class is fraught with waiting humiliations.

Yet as an educator of particular empathy and creativity, Mid-Pacific Institute’s sixth-grade PE teacher has made his mark designing, refining and building upon a unique project-based approach to physical education that allows each of his young charges to participate in its planning and to highlight the best of their abilities.

“I’m open-minded about student input,” said O’Connell, 51. “It’s their class. We have standards we want them to reach, but there can be some creativity in how we get them there.”

O’Connell spent several years teaching at the high school level before turning his attention to MPI’s middle school ranks. The rare teacher who actually prefers interacting with adolescents in their most awkward and manic stage of development — “Their energy is refreshing!” — O’Connell was eager to move beyond traditional sport-based PE curricula as a way to engage a broader spectrum of students.

He found inspiration in the NBC series “American Ninja Warrior,” which pits top-flight athletes against challenging obstacle courses in a season-long competition. Re-creating specific skills challenges with whatever equipment he had available, O’Connell was heartened by his students’ response. O’Connell said the course took on a life of its own once he allowed students to design their own obstacles.

“I was able to reach a lot more students,” he said. “A student might not be good at football or baseball or basketball, but all of them can do quad steps, vault, climb, crawl, run or jump. Connecting outside the big four sports gave students a chance to show what they could do. You might not be able to throw a football, but if you can vault a pommel horse, that’s amazing.”

O’Connell was born and raised in Fayetteville, Ark., and attended Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., where he met his wife, Kaili Trask, a graduate of Punahou School. After completing a degree in psychology, O’Connell spent the next 15 years as a college basketball coach, first as a volunteer assistant coach under George Raveling at the University of Southern California (where he earned a master’s degree in exercise science) and later at his alma mater.

O’Connell and his family (he and Kaili have three children) moved to Hawaii in 2004.

At MPI, O’Connell said, he has the freedom, support and encouragement to take his instruction in new directions. That was the case a couple of years ago when he adapted his ANW curriculum to the school’s cross-curricular theme of “systems.”

Working with social studies teacher JoAnn Jacobs, whose classes were studying biomes, O’Connell had his students design and build obstacles inspired by rainforests, deserts, tundra and other habitats they were studying. These were arranged into obstacle courses the students used in competition in his PE class. To enhance the experience, O’Connell also had his students preview what the obstacles might actually look like in their actual environments through the use of virtual reality.

O’Connell also worked with project inquiry teacher Sumoha Min to re-create the student-designed obstacles into the video game “Minecraft.”

“As a kid growing up, I played a lot of different sports, including sports that were outside the mainstream, like springboard diving and judo,” O’Connell said. “I always enjoyed doing different things and testing out a lot of physical activities. Exposing students to different systems and different ways of playing prepares them to think outside the box.”

Check out O’Connell’s class at 808ne.ws/2InRHta.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.