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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. 

Fracking in School Sports

May 1, 2015

First there were rumors, then there were reports, and now there are beginning to be results from geological surveys warning that the process of fracking in oil and gas exploration and deep ground extraction is increasing the frequency of earthquakes in several parts of the United States.

I want to say, “Duh! How could it not?” Why would it surprise any rational human being that the delicate blue marble we inhabit would not get off kilter when we bore deep into the surface with drills and explosive charges and then pump water at high pressure into the tunnels we create and the crevices we exploit? When I put that picture in my mind, I shudder.

Often I picture the world of school sports like this marble we inhabit. Sometimes I see exploiters drilling deep into our core, dropping explosives, applying pressure, and extracting what they believe are valuable resources while laying waste to everything else, including very much that is very precious to very many other people – in fact, to most athletes, coaches, administrators, officials, parents and spectators.

We should pay attention to the times when we feel our foundation shaking, even just a little. We should make it difficult for the exploiters to extract our elite, especially when they disregard and lay waste to everything else that holds our world – educational athletics – together.