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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.
Second Half by MHSAA

In Search of a Quarterback

October 6, 2011

As America works and wanders its way through the messiness of choosing its presidential candidates, I look around for ones that I wish were available, and I find the choices quite limited and disappointing.  Seems I’ve always tended to favor those who were least electable.

One of those “losers” of years gone by was Jack Kemp who, ironic for the times we now live in, was considered a little too conservative for the national ticket.

Actually, Kemp – the former NFL quarterback, U.S. Congressman and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under the first President Bush – appears more balanced and bright than any in the field of candidates the Republican Party will offer this time around.

Kemp’s platform circa 1992 was to be “optimistic, inclusive and ready for change.”  That was his personal style and his prescription for America.

I wish we’d have that choice today for quarterbacking our nation.

But regardless, his approach – “optimistic, inclusive and ready for change” – remains a perfect prescription for organizational leaders, including those who are responsible for schools and school sports.