Jousting at Windmills
July 19, 2012
Charles Barkley uttered famously last month that the worst thing that ever happened to basketball was the AAU.
While it doesn’t all occur under the Amateur Athletic Union’s banner, Mr. Barkley is not the first “authority” to offer such a brash opinion and to blame the AAU for much of what is bad about the current state of non-school basketball, where street agents and shoe companies corrupt children and their coaches, and where basketball is played with little emphasis on fundamental skills and team play.
Certainly, there are others to blame, including all who have made college and professional basketball a business lucrative enough to encourage excesses and unethical practices. And all of this is bigger than any one state high school athletic association can change.
Nevertheless, the MHSAA is in its fourth year of quixotic jousting with the monster about which so many have been complaining so long.
Tomorrow for boys, and then eight days later for girls (July 26), the MHSAA is teaming up again with the Basketball Coaches Association of Michigan (BCAM) to provide Reaching Higher, “an advance placement course” for students who have both the interest and potential to participate in college basketball on some level.
Through Reaching Higher we intend for players and parents to gain greater appreciation for the rules and realities of the college recruitment process and for what it takes both academically and athletically to qualify for and succeed in intercollegiate basketball.
Click here to view the details.
In An Instant
August 4, 2015
The icebergs that enter the harbors along Newfoundland’s north shore started to form thousands of years ago. They broke from ice flows 10 times their size and then got caught in a current that carried them on a 1,000-mile, two-year journey to “Iceberg Alley.” Some of them drift into harbors and, with seven-eighths of their mass below the surface, they get grounded. Eventually they break apart and disappear.
My wife and I “discovered” one of these grounded ‘bergs near the shore of cozy little Coffee Cove. After a 15-minute hike, we got closer to this sparkling monster than third base is to home plate. We each snapped dozens of pictures.
Just as we were turning to begin our hike back to “civilization,” we heard what we thought was a loud gunshot. But what actually occurred was a portion of the iceberg breaking off and falling into the water.
What we had taken pictures of moments earlier no longer existed as it had at that time. In an instant, the iceberg had changed, without respect for the thousands of years in the making and the hundreds of miles of traveling.
A few days after we returned to Michigan, Rich Tompkins died, apparently healthy, just after waterskiing. Death came without respect for the miles Rich had traveled to serve student-athletes and coaches, and without regard to all the victories his teams had earned and MHSAA championships they had won.
I last saw Rich on Valentine’s Day at the first-ever Fremont High School Hall of Fame induction banquet where Rich and many of his athletes were honored. The pictures taken that night are of people and circumstances that can never be reassembled.
We need to more fully appreciate the miracle of such moments. They can be gone in an instant.