Logo

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.

One More Call

November 23, 2011

This blog continues with lessons learned on my highly motivating but sometimes hot seat at the MHSAA.  It’s Lesson No. 4:  Make one more call.

Not 100 percent of the time, but well over 50 percent of the time, if I had made one more call before making or communicating a tough decision, either the decision would have been different or, more often, the decision would have been received better.

Obviously there are limits to this. There always could be one more call.  But it has become a “Roberts Rule of Order” anyway to make one more call. For I can trace an inordinate percentage of wrong decisions, or bad reactions to correct decisions, to not making one more call.

More often than not on difficult decisions, I work in tandem with other MHSAA staff and especially Associate Director Tom Rashid who now routinely makes that one more call. It has improved both our decisions and communications.