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sport

First day of classes

Oh it was hot today. The shade was a good four or five degrees cooler, and I was grateful for the shade. There’s a reason people move more slowly where I’m from, and this is that reason. In the old days, before forced air, a person would perish in the real heat. And sometimes they’d do that before they burst into flames. It’s true. You don’t read about it in books all that often, because the books would ignite too. Also, they ban some books there now, which is, we can all agree, just about the most offensive and dumbest performative thing you can do to a collection of ideas. Though the act of doing so does seem to create a lot of curiosity about the ideas contained therein. An inquisitive and rebellious human nature has that going for it.

There’s no reason at all I’m on that subject. It’s really hot here today. It was hot tonight. And humid. It was humid like home. And there were insects everywhere. But we’ll get to that.

Well, class. I have one class on Tuesday. This is Digital Media Processes, and its about the structure and concepts behind our social and digital media. And if that sounds fun, it is! But more is watching me stumble my way through trying to find an easy way to discuss what it means to discuss the conceptual nature of things without getting ahead of myself, which is precisely what I did today. Hey, it was my first day, too.

This was my 19th first day. One day, I’m going to be good at it. Maybe on the 20th first day.

This class was supposed to be in the same building where my office is, but it got moved for logistical reasons and so now I must walk some 450 feet feet and around a corner, to another building. There on the corner is a fiberglass statue. It is a statue of a man and woman in a deep hug and perhaps a passionate kiss, depending on where you are standing. And I’m wondering how many times I’ll walk by it before I think something like, “Awwww, that’s nice,” or “Get a room you guys!” Twice as I walked by it today, I had that sort of reaction to the statue. Let us chart, this semester, how long it takes for something to sink into both sides of my brain.

The class is on the fourth floor of this building, which is where they put all the great classes. All of the professors wind up in the hot box eventually, according to the campus tradition I just made up. They don’t, apparently, put air conditioning in that class. I was sitting at the desk in the front of the room sweating, and it wasn’t nerves. My jacket may have been too heavy for this early in the term. Every jacket is.

Anyway, we did Syllabus and Expectation Day. I talked about what the class was. You’re threading a needle there, I think. I need them to come back. I need them to think this is interesting or useful for them. I don’t want to overwhelm them on the first day. I also need to tell the story of the class and introduce myself and get them talking just a little bit, because they’re going to be doing that a lot this term. And I need to show them the course and a slide deck and I have 75 minutes to do all this.

Here’s my bet, I’ll get back in the groove of laying out and delivering a 75 minute class before I figure out that statue is a statue. Time my brain understands — despite how often I am late in arriving at places. I can still talk 60 seconds without a clock and wrap it up on the post, because of my time in broadcasting, and I haven’t been on the air since the Bush administration. Seventy-five minutes I’ll get adjusted to. My other class, which runs two hours and 45 minutes, I’ll get adjusted to. Can I manage both in one semester? Is that a statue, or are those real people, moving slowly? Very. Very. Slowly.

We traveled from our campus to another campus to see my god-niece-in-law (just go with it) play in her first university field hockey game. I’ve known this little girl her whole life and now we’re watching this young woman, on day two of being a college student, start for her field hockey team as a true freshman.

She’s playing as a forward. She’s been working hard and I’m sure she’ll continue to work hard. The game didn’t go their way this evening. There were two lightning delays. And then the bugs descended. Have you ever been to an event at night where that really fine mist plays on you? The sort where you can’t really see it, but you can feel it and it is so obviously there? And then you look up into the lights and you can see all of that rain dancing and reflecting the light? This was like that, only with insects. More insects than you need to see at one place. The team we were there to see were the visitors and the home team needs to invest in some bats. If they did, those bats would live well.

At one point, the insects were just falling on us. Not flying into us. Falling on us. We joked that despite the two lightning delays, and the continued lightning that the officials ignored in the second half, that they would only call the game if two more almost-plague-like events occurred.

The home team, who no one likes very much won the game. The Knights, who we were cheering on, will fight on again another day. Lane played 52 minutes in probably the most humid conditions any of those young women have ever experienced. It felt like home, honestly. We — her parents were there, as where her grandparents and her aunt and some of her cousins — were sweating just sitting, dodging insects, and cheering on the Knights. Field hockey players do a lot of running.

I have seen enough to see how she is progressing at the craft. When she’s had a few more games in hand I’ll be interested to hear her opinion on how this game is different than the high school version. I noticed a bit of that here, in this one example, and this sport is inscrutable to me. (I stood behind the goal of one of her last high school games and, to me, a soccer goalie, I could see the game a lot better and understand it a bit more, but there’s always a lot to learn.)

Started her first game! She is that rare young person that can peer into the long term. I suspect she’s going to soon come to realize that if she keeps working hard, even better things are going to come her way. Sometimes the ball lands at your feet. She’ll be ready to put it in the cage.

Finally, since it is the first day of the month, I did all of the regular first-day-of-the-month things. I cleaned my desktop. I cleaned the downloads. I emptied the computer’s trash bin. I updated my boilerplates. I updated the spreadsheet where I keep site stats. (Doesn’t everyone do that?) Last month had the most visits in the 22-year history of the site. More than a quarter of a million! I don’t know why you’re all here, I’m grateful for every one of you that isn’t a bot. I’m glad you came back. I hope you’ll do it again.

Also, I updated the art on the front page of the site. This is another 10-photo collage from South Africa, at the Cape of Good Hope. Here’s the theme, but then go look. This will be here when you come back.

Those images will stay up for a month. I’ll update them again for October. Let’s all have a great time until then, shall we?

More tomorrow, including the second first day of classes.

memories / Philadelphia / photo / site / sport / Wednesday — Comments Off
12
Aug 26

I can see mulch and top soil again

What a fine day. Productive and rewarding in several senses, but not in all of them. One can’t be productive in every sense. We weren’t designed for that. How else would we have developed imagination, hope, and ambition? How else would we have ever learned to fly, go to space, develop life saving vaccines, study the planet and what we’re doing to it? If we could do everything all at once, how would we have internalized concepts like dreams, lists, and ways to judge our neighbors against our efforts? Someone had to have the idea of emulating the birds, and s/he and their ilk were scorned for generations, until one day it wasn’t a flight of fancy, it was a flight. And you couldn’t do that or go to space or any of our other marvels, really, without the ability to create and pursue lists. We’re talking about human pursuit here! You can’t pursue everything at once. The neighbors would stare and talk.

I hope not too many people are doing that around here, because we’ve given them something to judge of late. There’s a lot of weeding to be done, but it’s been so deliriously hot. The temperatures settled into the low 90s today, however, and I went outside in the morning and pulled things out of the ground for a while.

My first job was a summertime thing working for one of my teachers. She was a horticulturist, and she had a summer side hustle landscaping one of the big houses on the mountain. The husband was a surgeon. A plastic surgeon, I think. Or a heart surgeon. Something that set him up well enough to marry a woman who descended from old money. (People knew the family name.) It was a gorgeous house, made to look ancient by the stone work that didn’t come from our red clay hills. It had a commanding view of the city in the valley below, the city her family had left a few generations before. The city where her family name was on one of the skyscrapers downtown, which you could see standing at their sink, or at their pool, or in any part of the house that looked to the northwest. They had a Rolls Royce Phantom 2 in the garage, giant oil paintings of themselves in the foyer that was, itself, bigger than any house I’d ever seen. And they had landscaping needs that meant after we’d worked our way across the whole of the yard it was time to go back to the other side and start again. I was in the 8th grade and it was incredibly hot and that job taught me a lot, namely that I didn’t want to do that kind of work. My teacher also taught me about Tracy Chapman that summer. Everyone knew Fast Car, but she talked about that debut album and the followup, Crossroads and how somehow that had inspired her to go into the Peace Corps. That didn’t make sense at the time, but I guess I can see it now.

Anyway, I was thinking about that today, pulling weeds in my own flowerbeds, stuffing lawn bags and sweating and listening to Tracy Chapman. I was also hoping none of the neighbors would walk by, notice me doing all that and giving me the nod of disapproval.

“About time he got around to that.”

“The last owners would have never.”

“No they would not.”

Yeah, well, they had kids and I’m guessing the children got sent out to do their share of the work. Or they hired someone. We’ve done that. It’s been … spotty. Sometimes great. Sometimes aggressive. Sometimes questionable.

Anyway, one man did walk by and, even across the yard, you could hear that he was on the phone. I paused to listen, wondering if he’d say “He’s actually doing it. I know. I know! No really, he is!”

I didn’t get it all today. I don’t know that I can, or want to get it all. Pretty much the entire Tracy Chapman catalog is great, much of it peerless, but it would need to be much larger for me to get of this weeding finished. Plus, there’s other work to be done. But there are things on the southern side of the house that I didn’t want to get choked out by undesirables, so I did that for a while, until it was time to come in and cool off. Because while it was only 88 degrees, I still managed to do a credible sweat test this morning. But two hours, noon, 88 degrees, and three comically large bags of now dead green things are ready to be disposed of. The bulk of the work on the south side of the house is done. I could still probably pull weeds for another hour there, plus a good 20 minute weed-eating session. But enough is enough.

Also, we had afternoon plans.

A while back we met a man at a conference who runs this development program for kids where soccer is the entryway, but they’re ultimately working to create scenarios where preschool through high school kids and beyond can build healthy bodies and minds. They have an indoor park, outdoor fields and people show up for the soccer, but find a full slate of programming and services for their community. It sounds amazing and so today we went to see the operation.

There was some high school pick-up soccer underway on their indoor pitch. No one invited me to play, thank goodness. We saw the rest of their facilities, which are lovely and growing. It’s not a community center, it’s more than that. We talked with the people that run the place for about 90 minutes. They’re six years in and still growing and doing some great work. It’s not just sport. Sport gets kids in the door, but then there is programming that helps the children learn about things like nutrition, interpersonal skills, money management, confidence building, and so on. They aren’t trying to build soccer players, the goal is to help kids in ways that matter on a real and human level. It’s quite charming, they’re very passionate about it, and it’s easy to see why.

Sport, as we talk about in classes a lot, means a lot more than just what happens on the field. In one class I teach a section on the real values of youth sport — fair play, collaboration, health, socialization, discipline, rules, respect, etc… — and that’s what this organization is after, too. What’s really interesting, to me, when I talk about those life lessons with other people that played youth sports, even college students who aren’t that far removed from it themselves, they quickly see how it helped them. We don’t always realize it at the time, but it is apparent in retrospective. It is obvious the value we can offer people. It is a mystery there aren’t more deliberate programs just like that.

And when you compare that to the infamous travel ball experience … no contest.

Stuff on the site I’d like to do, since I mentioned it … There are two or three of the old running projects I’d like to return to, and I will. I have to wrap up the local markers project. Easy enough, and that’s the one I combine with bike rides anyway. When the weather turns. I want to return to the happy habit of scanning photos from old books. It’s time intensive, and that’s the problem, but ultimately it entertains me and makes this place look, determined to follow ancient thing.

Another thing I’d like to do more is diving into old newspaper clippings. It’s a great way to learn about a place, or remember about a place. But it seems odd to do that about places where I no longer live. And the place where I do live doesn’t have a wealth of digitized newsprint online. This could devolve into a “where do you belong?” paragraph, but this is Wednesday and while all of my projects on the site ideally would have a day of the week, roughly, the old existential issue is not a Wednesday item. (Wednesdays are for markers, if you’ll recall, and they will be so once again.

These projects one need only invest the time and I say the thing I always say to myself, “After so and so … then you can do that.” And that never changes, but it at least has the added advantage of being frustrating.

Tomorrow, back to the classwork. If I can bend my fingers to the keyboard.

adventures / NYC / photo / sport / Wednesday — Comments Off
24
Jun 26

The adidas Foundation’s ‘Power of Sport Talks’

Got up this morning and drove to the train station. It’s about an hour drive to where we wanted to be and for the first half hour we were right on the cusp of arriving in time to catch our train, or miss it. But after that first bit the road opened up and we made good time, arriving with four whole minutes to spare. Destination: the big city.

The adidas Foundation was holding a series of presentations that they called “The Power of Sport Talks.” It was an ideas forum, in the United States with a wide array of speakers focusing on how sport can drive “meaningful social change.” They put together a nice program of nine speakers. It was well done. Here are a few highlights.

Renata Simril, president and CEO of the LA84 Foundation which funds youth sport programs, infrastructure projects, commissions research, and creates educational initiatives. The power of the playground, and sport, are great equalizers, she said, but it is at risk for today’s youth. That power, she said, is only transformational if ALL kids can access it. If children continue to play, she said, they can learn the lessons and skills that the game provides. That, she said, was how children can “develop the habits of civic life.”

Dr. Hajar Abulfazl‘s talk approached youth sport from a different perspective. She grew up playing soccer player in Kabul. Playing as a little girl in Afghanistan, she says, was an act of defiance, and her purpose. She made the national team, and became the captain, but ultimately saw the squad dissolved by national policy and her teammates fleeing the country. Abulfazl then led a national program for youth soccer, going door-to-door, creating a new league, enrolling thousands of girls across seven provinces. The success, she said, was watching teenaged girls walk onto the pitch, knowing they belonged there. It was a fight she’d waged within her own family, as well. She moved to the US in 2017, discovered Soccer Without Borders and now works with immigrants and refugees from more than a dozen nations.

Tom Farrey, from The Aspen Institute, talk about the power of sport to do nothing less than save democracy. Government, he notes, is the ultimate form of “We.” Farrey points out that sport teaches people to collaborate across differences, teaches competition, rules, consequences, develop people capable of leading, and as venues to learn how to bring people together and develop shared solutions.

He touches on The Playground Movement that led to thousands of municipal playgrounds, many still open today across the country. He also talked about the negatives that we can encounter in youth sport, tribalism ultimately leading to nationalism, financial inequities and so on. Here, he points out that sport is not guaranteed to do the things we’d like, it’s how we use them.

“Democracy is about relationships and sport is about relationships in action,” Farrey said.

Mary Connor, a former first round WUSA draft pick, told a poignant and powerful story about a non-profit failure, and how it changed her personal life and her work ever since. Connor, now the CEO of Common Goal, a nonprofit using soccer to shape a world where every young person has the opportunity to play, learn, and thrive. Her challenge: to turn toward hard things.

“Are you designing for belonging? Or are you just hoping it shows up? It won’t show up on its own.”

It was a powerful presentation. The adidas Foundation said they’ll be publishing these talks soon. That means you’ll also hear from Jasmyne Spencer, who spent 12 years in the NWSL and last year won the inaugural Northern Super League Championship with the Vancouver Rise. She talked about togetherness as “the real beauty of sport,” which perhaps we all have some inkling of, even if only in enjoying a win in a crowd.

Carly Heinz, director of development at Beyond Sport talked about discovering tennis during Serena Williams’ first grand slam run. After moving on from competitive collegiate tennis, and the identity that comes with being an athlete, Heinz realized that the lessons from sport can apply to all of the seasons of life, that sport has a power to draw things out of us and can provide safe spaces for people to grow.

Sport, Heinz says, shows us the value of authenticity, “and gives us the opportunity to return to ourselves, fully, courageously, and honestly.”

Melissa Otterbein, director of fitness and healthy lifestyles for Special Olympics International discussed the health disparities of people with intellectual disabilities (shorter life, higher risk of diabetes, heart health and depression) and encouraged participation.

Rachele Pojednic, of Stanford University and also the Chief Science Officer at Restore, studies longevity, and talks about how we live, how we die, and what the heart really is.

“Muscle is the tissue of longevity,” she said. “The question isn’t whether you’ll lose it, you will. The question is whether you’re building reserve now.”

Pojednic said muscle buys you time, and the ability to move through your own life on your terms. Pojednic talked about scholarship that shows “The most important metric for heart muscle outcomes, not heavy weights, not Pilates, not Zone 2 … consistency. Consistency, diligence is the whole game. None of this requires you are an athlete. It requires you act like one.”

“You need the discipline of a sport,” Pojednic said.

This was the adidas Foundation’s first such effort in the United States, and it was a terrific program beyond these few highlights, but there is always a lot more to discuss – and a lot more to move us – in these areas. Hopefully the next “Power of Sport Talks” isn’t too far away.

After the event we got to go on the roof to take in a nice view of the city. We met some of the speakers, some other sport leaders and other scholars.

It was a nice event, and we’re lucky to have gone to it. After, we sought out a place to watch some of the World Cup. I chose the World Cup on the Terrace, at the Perelman Performing Arts Center. They promised two screens and their view did not disappoint.

Food and drinks from a welcoming staff and you could look up at this during lulls in the game. Who needs two big screens when you’ve got this to stare at?

We watched two games and a bit of a third one there, enjoyed over-cooked hamburgers and the company of a small crowd of people also there to enjoy a perfect and low key evening.

Caught the subway to the train, the train to the car, and the car home.

By which point I was itchy. Couldn’t wait to get off my sports coat. Couldn’t wait to pull off my long sleeved button down. Couldn’t wait to see the poison ivy. I grabbed some yesterday while weeding. Didn’t realize it until it was too late. Didn’t wash it all off well, or quickly enough, or both. And now I’ll itch for a few weeks.

I’m not going to dwell on it here, I’m just going to be miserable, or pitiful, or both.

Friday / Ireland / memories / photo / sport — Comments Off
8
May 26

A few steps closer to summer

Canvas, the platform the university uses for its online coursework, has returned to form. Came back late last night. This was only a problem because we’re in the middle of finals. Canvas died right in the middle of one of my final windows, in fact. The real problem was that the platform was hacked. There are secondary concerns. Did Instructure pay off the hackers? What got inserted into the code? Why did it just come back? Why didn’t the university’s IT people caution caution with returning to the thing? Why do we submit ourselves to annual training, and daily dual authentication processes, if as soon as this primary platform comes back the email just says, “It’s back!”

It said a little more, that email, but not much.

Anyway, I received the last few exams — they’re exams, but I’ve been calling them papers, my apologies — from the class that had their final window interrupted. I gave my online class an extra day to get their final projects and their exams in. Canvas was down for about eight hours, they got a 24-hour extension. Seemed fair.

It’ll all be fine, the finals I mean. Those are important IT questions that, hopefully, someone is answering.

It’s been a full day of it, but I’m hoping that, before tonight is done, I’ll have finished assessing 48 of those finals. Just 96 to go. (Guess what I’ll be doing this weekend!)

The cats are, helpfully, not helping with the grading. Sometimes they very much want to be involved. But, lately, Phoebe has been working on a new skill.

Poseidon climbs down to hit, or he muscles and claws his way up it. I’m not sure if he’s jumped to it. Phoebe has learned to climb onto now too. And where Poe looks so proud, Phoebe shifts into “So what? Now what?” pretty quickly.

Poe, for his part, has been taking seriously his new role as weatherproofing.

That’s the door to the garage, which we use a fair amount. When he doesn’t want you to go, you get a whole routine out of this now. It’s adorable. You just have to build in an additional 30 seconds of prep time to deal with him.

I wrote a little something, highlighting 10 Sports stories worth watching:

If your team isn’t in the thick of a postseason run you might be up for a little change of pace. Or, if the playoffs are too much, this could be just what you need to break the tension. Watch these 10 sports documentaries celebrating their 10th anniversary this year. See them for the first time. See them again for the first time. In chronological order, they are …

Keepers of the Game is about the members of an all-Native American girls lacrosse team fighting for acceptance on every level: within the tribe, at their school, and in the larger community. They want to play a game that was historically a boys’ and men’s game, they do this with no financial support from their school system, and against a heated rival who looms large on the schedule. It starts slow, but it becomes downright cinematic. Keepers of the Game was an official selection at the Tribeca Film Festival. It was nominated for an Emmy, won an award at Cannes and, in just 88 minutes allows us to see sometimes hesitant kids become confident athletes. Isn’t that what we want out of youth sports?

The Cleveland sports curse persisted for 52 years, a dry spell running from 1964 to 2016. (So if your teams aren’t in playoff contention right now, it could be worse.) Believeland aired in May of 2016. ESPN was hoping to cash in before King James inevitably rendered all the footage obsolete. The Cavs won the 2016 NBA Finals just 32 days later after it aired. A few weeks later, ESPN aired a version with a new ending, the exciting 3-1 come-from-behind series win. Between Believeland and the Cavs triumph, though, local man Stipe Miocic won the UFC Heavyweight Championship and the American Hockey League’s Lake Erie Monsters won the Calder Cup. We leave it to you to decide which was the greater inspiration for the Cavaliers.

There are eight more documentaries in that piece, all of them are good, several of them are truly great.

I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?

That’s Fanad Head. It’s a real treat.

bespoke / Ireland / memories / photo / Rowan / sport / Thursday / video — Comments Off
30
Apr 26

Suddenly the last day of class

I mentioned, Tuesday, my new custom-made lapel pin. Today I wore the second one I made and ordered. This is what I say at the end of each class, and it’s the last thing I say in my last lecture, which I build to all semester long.

Thanks for coming today. See you next time. Until then …

If that’s the way people think of me in the final analysis, then it’s worth repeating it.

And so I did it twice today, for the last two times. Weird, I always feel like I’m just getting to know the students, and that we’re all starting to feel comfortable in the room, when it’s time for the semester to end.

But it ended in a big way! In Rituals and Traditions we were joined by a colleague, the assistant athletic director for compliance and academic support, and the deputy athletic director for strategic initiatives and external engagement. They heard from five groups who have been working all semester on proposals for things that our athletic department to build traditions, increase student and community buy-in and improve the gameday experience. Those people were not prepared for how well the students did. Everyone was impressed, even the other students. One person said, “I thought our project was pretty good, but I wasn’t expecting everyone else’s to be so great.” No disrespect to that project, but that was a fair read.

I was proud to see their work come to fruition, and excited to see all of this come together in the context of this class I conceived out of my own interests, and then found plenty of literature to draw from will designing and implementing this class which I invented from whole cloth.

The athletic department people learned a lot because of their work, and because of their hustle. We conducted a survey and got 252 responses on the thing. The instrument told our students a lot and they leveraged that well, today.

Perhaps some thing or things that were said today will provide an inspiration or an impetus to the athletic department. That’s the idea. For certain the people that came to visit were impressed by what they heard and saw, which is great. I’m doing this class again in the fall. I hope to make the class even better.

In Criticism we closed the term by watching the almost avant-garde June 17, 1994.

We had just enough time at the end to talk about a few elements of the doc, and I gave them the final lecture, and someone came in to proctor evaluations.

In both classes I asked them, one more time, to be safe and be kind.

Outside tonight I was looking up at the moon and the clouds thinking about how fortunate I am to get to say that to groups of young people, over and over, for three months.

It was 9:22 when I took that photo. And after that I started thinking about how fortunate I am to have, now, the next couple of weeks to wrap up the semester’s work.

We watched that sunset at Downpatrick Head.