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The Best Is Yet To Come

June 17, 2014

My last posting was built on six words from the novel, No Small Mischief, a fictional memoir of life in Nova Scotia’s northernmost region. Today’s posting is launched from an 11-word passage from the same work: “Living in the past is not living up to our potential.”

How horrible it is to peak in high school. 

To remember high school as the best days of life is not such a problem, unless it is true. If, in fact, we were at our best during our high school years, then we have failed to fully develop as human beings.

I heard an athletic director close a senior student-athlete awards program recently by saying, wisely, “I hope you will visit us, but not too long or too often. You need to get on with your lives.”

The high school experience – including competitive athletics – is not the end, not the fulfillment of anything. It is, at its best, the launching pad for life.

That it can be the best days of one’s youth should not make school sports the best years of one’s life.

Inside Information

September 25, 2015

The source you choose selects your news.

If your source is Fox News, you will get different stories than from ABC, CBS and NBC, and different slants on the same stories.

If your source is publicly supported radio, the news stories will be different than on commercial radio stations; and if you choose Public Radio International, you will hear some topics that are much more frequently and deeply covered than by National Public Radio.

PRI is, for example, where I was following the crisis of refugees fleeing from Northern Africa to Europe long before that story became headlines for other news sources. Did you know, for example, that there are more displaced people in the world today than at any time except World War II?

Similarly, if I were to listen only to coaches of one sport or another, I’m likely to learn about issues that affect that sport, but not much about issues that affect other sports, or affect schools as a whole. Our sources must include input from all sports. 

Our sources must also include the perspective of principals who deal with academics more than athletics and who are as attentive to the essential needs of harassed, homeless, displaced and disabled students as they are to the athletic desires of gifted and talented students.

And our sources must include the even broader perspective of superintendents who are fighting for the financial life of their districts. Sometimes that means they are throwing open the doors of their schools and recruiting students from far and wide to replace the dwindling school age children of their local population.

Ours is an association of schools. Not an association of football coaches, or of all coaches. Ours is an association of schools whose directions are determined by blending top-down with in-the-trenches views.

From our vantage point at the Michigan High School Athletic Association we do not learn about everything happening in our state’s secondary schools. But from the myriad calls, emails and letters we receive and the many meetings we have with administrators, coaches, officials and students, we know much more than those who are on the outside looking in.