Dreamworks
January 25, 2012
William Butler Yeats wrote, “In dreams begin responsibility.” And while this may not at all be what the Irish author had in mind, here’s what this line has meant to me.
When you dream for something, you hope for it; and there is little hope of that dream coming true unless you take personal responsibility for it. Until you begin to work for it, there’s no hope for it.
Jesse Owens said: “We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline and effort.”
In other words, dreams take work. Be that Martin Luther King’s dream for peaceful relations between people and nations, or the comparatively modest dreams we have for schools and school sports. Dreams take work.
Advancing CPR
November 24, 2015
This fall was the first for the requirement that all high school varsity head coaches have current certification in CPR.
If a coach was not CPR certified by the deadline (which was Sept. 17), that coach could not coach at or even be present at the MHSAA tournament where his/her team would be participating.
Only three of the MHSAA’s 750 member high schools failed to comply with that requirement. That’s progress.
But what we also hoped for was that schools which were not already doing so would use this new requirement as a means of providing or requiring CPR certification for assistant and subvarsity coaches as well. And it appears we’ve made some progress on this as well.
Of 640 responses received so far, 80 percent of schools arranged in-person CPR training for all high school varsity head coaches, and 67 percent included assistant and subvarsity coaches in this in-person training.
In the future, the MHSAA Representative Council will be considering refinements of the CPR requirement in order to increase the quantity of certified coaches and improve the quality of programs that are approved to fulfill the requirement. Continuing progress is imperative.