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Family Time

August 29, 2014

When my wife and I were raising two sons who participated in high school wrestling, we had two hopes before each large wrestling meet in which they participated. First, that they wouldn’t get hurt; and second, that they would win their last match of the day.
We didn’t care if that last match was for 7th, 5th, 3rd or 1st place. The ride home was just a lot brighter when the last match was a victory. We always struggled for the right words when the last match of the day was a loss.
So my wife and I found it especially interesting to read an article about Jeff Daniels published Aug. 7 in the Lansing State Journal that included this excerpt:
Daniels attributes some of his family’s closeness to life in Chelsea and traveling around Michigan to play hockey.
“I’m a big fan of soccer, however, we went hockey and never looked back,” he said. “Ben was 8, and Luke was 5 when they started in hockey in Ann Arbor. All those 5:45 a.m.’s on Yost Arena ice on Saturday and Sunday. All the way through the end of high school.
“I tell parents now, it’s not whether the kid excelled, it’s not, ‘Why didn’t you shoot instead of pass, ‘You’ve got to work on your slap shot.’ It’s not that,” he said.
“It’s the drive there and the drive back. And you talk about anything else except about the game. And we believe that the time we spent doing that, and not focusing on pounding your kid to be better at the next game when he’s 12 damn years old, is one reason we’re so close as a family when the kids are in their 20s.”

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?