Silence is Golden
July 2, 2013
During the summer weeks, "From the Director" will bring to you some of our favorite entries from previous years. Today's blog first appeared Oct. 22, 2010.
A minor repair to a vocal cord forced me into 48 hours of silence recently. I rather enjoyed it and, frankly, was a little sorry to see it end.
You see, when you can’t talk, you’re forced to listen; and when you can’t talk, you’re more inclined to think. Not “think before you speak,” just think.
I’ll spare you the time spent counting my many blessings, as well as the time worrying about a few family matters. But I’ll share with you some thoughts I had about our common ground, that is, school-sponsored sports in Michigan.
I believe the future of school sports hangs in the balance of how we respond to the financial pressures local programs now experience. It worries me that too many responses are putting local programs on a course that will fundamentally and forever knock school sports off the course of educational athletics.
- We are mistaken if we believe a $225 participation fee to play JV tennis doesn’t change the nature of JV tennis.
- We are mistaken if we believe that a competitive athletic program, with high emotion and risk of injury, can be administered by inexperienced or part-time athletic administrators without clerical and event supervision assistance.
- We are mistaken if we believe that we can operate educational athletics without our coaches involved in ongoing education regarding the best practices of working with adolescents.
It isn’t educational athletics if the program does not promote broad and deep participation and does not have expert leadership and coaching.
That is what I thought about. And what I intend to speak about.
Our End of the Pool
June 26, 2012
The six-year veteran CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi, told Fortune magazine’s Geoff Colvin in a June feature, “Courage in leadership is very difficult, especially in today’s world, where the media doesn’t take time to really understand you.”
We can relate to this in our work in school sports, as very many veteran sports journalists and broadcasters have retired or been downsized, replaced by staff who are fewer in number and relationships and weaker in institutional knowledge and professionalism.
Whenever I read, watch or hear news accounts concerning topics that involve our work and about which I know a lot, I can see how incomplete and inaccurate the reporting is. This has always been true, but now is much more obvious; and this has made me even more skeptical when I read through other topics about which I know less. How much of this is opinion, not fact? What facts are incompletely presented? What “facts” are just plain wrong?
In this environment, it’s risky for leaders to step out with new initiatives; and it’s even riskier to defend the status quo, for the establishment is routinely presumed to be wrong by media who now often lack subject-matter depth and historical perspective.
Still, it remains the leader’s role, according to Jim Collins in Great by Choice, to not just predict the future, but to go out and create it anyway – in spite of criticism by media who have little experience swimming in our subject matter and who are merely wading into the shallow end of our deep pool. Sometimes creating the future means doing something new and different; but just as often – perhaps even more so – it means defending something whose existence helps to maintain the very essence of educational athletics.