Sportsmanship in our Bones
January 3, 2013
When my younger son was playing soccer – he was seven or eight years old at the time – he tumbled out of bounds and down a little hill. When he climbed back up the slope to the soccer pitch he was covered in burrs.
As he began to delicately remove the prickly burrs, play resumed – except that one player on the opposing team, the player marking my son, stopped to assist my son in removing the prickers. And he continued to help my son until all the burrs were removed. Only then did the two of them rejoin the game, together.
Observing this profoundly shaped my belief that sportsmanship is not dead. It’s not out of date and it’s not out of style. Good sporting behavior is in our bones, in our DNA.
Even before they can pronounce the word, and long before they can define it, kids know what sportsmanship is.
Change the rules in the middle of a game with six, seven or eight year olds – any card game, board game or sports game – and they’ll shout, “Hey, that’s not fair!” We must assure that natural instinct is still demonstrative when they are 16, 17 and 18 year olds.
Perspective
July 9, 2018
(This blog first appeared on MHSAA.com November 2, 2010)
Each summer I put together a list of all the problems we’re addressing and all the projects we know we’ll be working on through the MHSAA during the year ahead. It’s always a long list, and accomplishing just a few items would make any year a good year.
So, this requires that we try to decide between all that we might do and all that we must do. And here’s a reminder of one thing we must do.
When I ask school and community groups with whom I’m speaking about what they think the problems are in school sports, the most popular responses from these constituents are (1) too little funding, and (2) too many misdirected parents; or sometimes that order is reversed: over-involved parents and under-funded programs.
I like to caution people that in some situations, our students suffer from too little adult engagement in their lives and that, almost everywhere, interscholastic athletics benefit greatly from the time and energy parents and other adults volunteer to help local programs operate. But I get the point of what I’m hearing.
These and other responses I hear – serious as these cited problems can be – may merely be symptoms of the single, fundamental issue that’s at the heart of all the others. That’s perspective.
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Too little money for schools and sports?
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Pressure-packed parents?
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Poor sportsmanship?
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Too much specialization? Too much year-round competition?
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Too much talk of college athletic scholarships?
Perspective – spending money on less essential things.
Perspective – people focusing on adults’ desires more than students’ needs.
Perspective – forgetting or never learning the pure purpose of educational athletics.
Perspective again.
Perspective once again.
In essence, almost all issues arise from matters of perspective. At their root, almost all problems are problems of perspective.
What can we do about this?
I don’t have the perfect prescription; but one thing is certain: we can’t relegate this to an afterthought. We cannot hope to make time to address this problem each day; we must plan to make time for it each day.
We need to model a positive perspective. Point to it when we see it. Explain it. Reward it.
It can’t be left to others. We are the guardians of proper perspective. It’s Job 1.