On the Hook
March 12, 2013
The over-arching theme of interscholastic athletic administration today is the health and safety of our student participants. It’s always our most important concern but now, by both self-serving and serious advocates, it’s being made a political football – actually more like a soccer ball being kicked back and forth and back again, resulting in about as much chance of scoring any positive goals as a World Cup soccer game will have in scoring any goals at all.
We are daily being distracted, and taken off our tasks, by symbolic more than substantive proposals to require this, that or the other thing to protect children from the risk of injury – regardless of grassroots input and without regard to grassroots resources. Zealous advocates for child safety wish to protect children from any risk of physical exertion, while in the next breath they complain of youth inactivity and obesity. And those who are trying to increase participation AND the quality of that experience – that’s us – become the targets of criticism. Often, those who have never done anything, blame those who have done a lot, for not doing enough.
Our frustration is flowing from the health and safety “idea du jour” to which we must respond, knowing that every time we fail to gush over some legislator’s or advocate’s notion, we invite the characterization that we are uncaring, lazy or arrogant, or all of the above. What we are doing is protecting schools from ubiquitous, onerous mandates which no one else in the school community is taking notice of because, appropriately, they are focused on the impossible task of providing an ever-expanding list of required services to an ever-increasing percentage of school-aged children with an ever-increasing list of problems, with the expectation that all of them will perform at ever-improving levels of achievement.
But even with all these disclaimers, I can’t let us off the hook. There are some things we can do and must do to better meet our highest calling in educational athletics which, if we’ve lost sight of it in the confusing clutter of challenges, is not only to do no harm physically to students but also to help instill in them healthy habits for the rest of their lives. Consistent with this high calling, we have obligations to do some critically important things – sometimes in spite of outside interference and sometimes beyond that interference – and do so without delay. It is about those things that I have been commenting most these past few months, and will continue to address.
Panama Points
January 25, 2012
Author David Kord Murray opines in Borrowing Brilliance that almost all good ideas are borrowed, and the farther afield one roams from the topic at hand the more useful the idea may be (and the more brilliant it may appear to be).
So it didn’t surprise me to discover useful ideas for modern day leadership and management in a book written in the 1970s about a period many years before that – David McCullough’s history of the building of the Panama Canal titled The Path Between the Seas.
I learned first that the primary task of this huge project was not what it appears to be. It was not primarily an engineering feat, but medical. Not removing dirt, but disease. Not conquering the largest obstacles, but the smallest insects. It was only after the diseases were understood and controlled that the construction could advance and the project could be completed.
Second, I learned that once the construction was begun, there was a bigger challenge than digging the pathway clear. It was removing the unwanted dirt and debris to other places. It wasn’t the front end of the project alone that mattered, but the back end as well: where to put the hundreds of millions of tons of rock and dirt on or around this narrow isthmus of land.
For every project there is need to assess what the underlying issues are that might get in the way of accomplishing the more apparent tasks before us.
And for every project there is need to fully assess consequences. We don’t want merely to move the dirt around, creating new problems as we do so.
I will be considering these thoughts as I soon see with my own eyes the Panama Canal, constructed over four decades and completed almost 100 years ago. And gratefully, I will be fully immunized for diseases largely conquered during the completion of this engineering marvel.