When my wife was going through items her 89-year-old mother had kept prior to her death, she discovered a yellow butterfly-shaped ashtray my wife had made as a Brownie in the 1950s.  Can you imagine that?  We had young girls making ashtrays!

Which caused us to wonder:  what is it we are doing with our youth today that will seem just as incredibly stupid 50 years from now?

We learned years ago that how we handled water breaks during hot, humid practice days of the 1960s was all wrong.  We’ve learned that many of the exercises we warmed up with in the 1980s were really counter-productive.  What else might there be that we learned as athletes and taught as coaches that has since been discredited as we have learned more from sports physiology and psychology?

One of the essentials of effective leadership is to be curious; and one of the important activities of leaders is to be continually learning, especially about the beliefs we hold most dearly and the activities that affect student-athletes most directly.