I was born in the middle of the Great Depression. My Dad was driving a tractor for one of the farmers in the Southern San Joaquin Valley of California. His pay was 18 cents per hour for a 10-12 hour day, that’s two bucks a day, or 12 U.S. dollars a week. That’s for six [...]
Our world is in what I would call “Cultural Chaos.” Whatever happened to “live and let live” or perhaps more accurately “be and let be?” I have been a keen observer of human behavior and the struggles involved since I was six years old. I have no scientific data or empirical proof my viewpoint. I [...]
It seems to me that people are overly critical of the authenticity of sports movies. Since most sports movies are about sports heroes, don’t you think producers are a bit handicapped in finding an actor who could perform with the athletic talent of people such as Babe Ruth, Gayle Sayers or even the minor league [...]
In this day and age of escalated salaries in professional sports, it would seem that some athletes could just be playing for the money. I seriously doubt that is the primary reason. If suddenly there were no professional sports you would find these same athletes playing a pickup game somewhere. Of course, they want to [...]
Early on in life (4-10 years old), we are shocked by something that then has us decide something about ourselves. Usually, in some way we have a way to survive. As we get older we develop a way to fix our consistent reaction to anything that doesn’t work. That becomes our strong suit, i.e. the [...]
Coaches clearly know the value of practice. But, I am not as clear about their relationship to practice. They are freaked out when circumstances prevent a scheduled practice. Or, the team has a “bad” practice. Or, they worry did we have enough practice? The truth is that no one knows the perfect number of practices [...]
For those of you who have been around for awhile I have a question—”Did this ever happen to you?" “Did what happen?" you are thinking. The answer to that question is as follows. First,a little background. As you climb the ladder in your chosen profession or career the leadership accountabilities grow. At some point you [...]
The past week’s Sports Illustrated cover story was “Homeless Athletes.” I don’t know the authors’ intent for sure and I am pretty sure that they wanted to create attention around a problem to cause something good to happen. There is nothing new or exceptional about this problem. It has been that way since I began [...]
Today is the first day of the second workshop we have done at Providence College over the past few days. We worked with the lacrosse team last weekend and are working with the softball team starting this afternoon. The work we are doing is called Building a Championship Team, and we have been teaching this [...]
I have questions. The first question I have is “where are we headed?” We live in a world that basically doesn’t work. We have territorial wars. We have religious wars. We have other ideological conflicts. It sounds like the world in 300 B.C. … so much for technology. We live in a world that is [...]