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Pay to Play

July 28, 2015

Our local newspaper recently reported that a group of 8-year-olds had qualified for a national 3-on-3 soccer tournament July 31 to Aug. 2 at a theme park resort in Florida; but the report said the team had to raise $5,000 for the privilege.

Without knowing it at the time, the players and coaches qualified on the basis of a second-place finish at a tournament last August in Hastings, Michigan. Really? Second place? Last year?

Let’s be frank. The basis for qualifying for this national event in Florida was not a runner-up finish in a tournament for 7-year-olds the previous summer in a small town in Michigan. The basis for qualifying was the ability to raise $5,000 so the resort could fill its hotel rooms and sell tickets to its theme parks.

National tournament? Baloney. If you can pay, then you can play. Sell this as an expensive family trip, perhaps; but as a national tournament, it has zero integrity.

This kind of hype and hypocrisy adds to the challenges of administering sane and sensible school sports. Neither 8- nor 18-year-olds need national tournaments. There’s a lot more bang for the buck in our own backyards.

We Need A Picture

December 18, 2012

One of our family traditions is to start and complete a new puzzle each Thanksgiving Day.  This past year’s 1,000-piece project tested our guests’ perseverance and, technically, it wasn’t completed on Thanksgiving, but just after 1 a.m. on the next day with only two of the original 16 guests still on task.

As is customary, the cover of the box in which the puzzle came provided a picture of the finished work.  Those working the puzzle kept passing the box top around to get closer looks at the specific portions of the puzzle that had their attention.

At one point my son mentioned how incredibly difficult it would be to complete a complicated puzzle without any picture.

Which caused me to consider that trying to solve any puzzle – any problem – is made almost impossibly difficult without a clear picture of what the solution should look like.  To put together the pieces of the solution to a problem requires at least some vision of the solution.