Destiny
May 1, 2012
A University of Wisconsin football player from my hometown years ago was hit from behind in the closing minutes of spring football practice. It caused an injury that required surgery. That caused him to miss the next fall’s football season; and to protect him from further injury, he was allowed to skip the following spring’s football practice and to work out with the Badgers baseball team.
He ended up leading the Big Ten Conference in hitting, and he eventually received the largest signing contract in the history of professional baseball, becoming the first “Bonus Baby” for Gene Autry’s Los Angeles Angels.
“If not for that injury in football,” he once told an audience, “caused by an unskilled walk-on in the last five minutes of the last spring football practice, I would never have played college baseball. I would never have played Major League Baseball for 11 seasons.
“You never know,” he said, “when you are five minutes from your destiny.”
Ideas, Not Events
November 17, 2015
U.S. Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover is credited with the statement, “Average minds discuss events, while great minds discuss ideas.” Perhaps that’s so.
In any event, what I would like to see from MHSAA sport committees is less talk about events of the past and more time discussing ideas for the future. Less time on MHSAA tournament details and more time on the sport itself, and particularly on ideas that will make the sport not just safer, but also healthier for participants with respect to its demands in-season and out.
Less focus on results, and more attention to process. Day in and day out, how does the sport help and how might it hurt the student in a holistic sense, seeing the child not just as an athlete but also as a student and a person with activity interests beyond sports?
What are the ideas we need to develop and advance that will more assuredly cause student-athletes to develop habits for a healthier life precisely because they participated in school sports?