Another Way to Learn
October 30, 2012
In 2000, I had the pleasure of listening to a speech by Ken Dryden, who had been goalkeeper for Cornell University when it was the NCAA Ice Hockey Champion in the 1960s. Ken Dryden then was a goalkeeper in the National Hockey League for eight years. Then president of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and he’s a lawyer.
Ken Dryden said that the greatest lesson of sport is that most things go wrong; in fact, that they almost always go wrong. He said he’s seen dozens of coaches on hundreds of occasions diagram plays in the locker room where every defender is blocked just so and every pattern is executed perfectly.
But what you learn in competition, said Dryden, is that the plans almost always go awry, that the patterns almost always break down. What you learn in competition is to not get upset, but to improvise and find another way to get the puck in the goal or the ball in the net.
What happens to the high school student, asked Dryden, who doesn’t play sports in high school and who gets all A’s, a 4.3 grade point average on a 4 point scale, 100 percent on test scores all the time, who never has anything go wrong? What happens to that student in college when he or she gets 90 percent, or 80 percent, or worse. What happens to that student when something goes wrong in life?
Dryden concluded that sport is not frivolous, it’s another way to learn.
It’s Not Where, But How
April 28, 2017
As happens from time to time, but too often, the urgent has crowded out the important for the Michigan High School Athletic Association this spring. For example ...
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A flooded soccer field at Michigan State University has forced relocation of the MHSAA Girls Soccer Finals in June.
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The extravagant demise of The Palace of Auburn Hills following the relocation of the Detroit Pistons to the new Little Caesars Arena in Detroit is forcing relocation of the 2018 MHSAA Individual Wrestling Finals.
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Lack of availability at MSU‘s Breslin Student Events Center on the dates of the three-day MHSAA Girls Basketball Semifinals and Finals in 2018 and boys championships in 2019 is forcing changes for those tournaments.
When, after countless hours of study and discussion, these and other venue changes are announced, they generate many media reports and considerable constituent comment – in fact, much more attention than two years ago when the MHSAA announced three actions that were unprecedented nationally to promote participant health and safety: mandated concussion reporting, free concussion care gap insurance, and two sideline concussion detection pilot programs.
Where MHSAA championships are staged is not inconsequential, but it is infinitely less important than how interscholastic athletic programs are conducted during practices and contests at the local level all season long.
When we are consumed with where we play, we divert valuable time and energy away from necessary attention to what we should be doing and how we should be doing it.