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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.

Building Future Support

December 19, 2017

Editor's Note: This blog originally was posted December 17, 2013, and the message still serves purpose today.


Most students would rather play sports than watch other people play.

This is obvious; but often we make both little decisions and large ones that seem to ignore this truth. More often than necessary we create more opportunities for watchers than we do for players.

Ultimately this leads to non-watchers because people – especially young people – tend to lose interest when they don’t play. We know this because, in school after school, we find that the best boosters – the most frequent and fervent spectators – are the students who participate on their school’s other teams.

It is also true that those who played sports when they were in school, and those whose children now play in school sports, are the people who will support schools most strongly in the future.

This too seems obvious, but still, many school districts all across this state and nation appear to make decisions like it has never occurred to them.

Every time we cut a kid from a high school team, we create critics of our programs – the student’s parents today and this student in the future. If the program has no room for a student today, why would we ever expect that student or his/her parents will support our programs tomorrow?

No-cut policies for all outdoor sports and larger squads for indoor sports – beginning at younger grade levels – will be among the policies of school districts which hope to retain school sports beyond the next generation or two.