A colleague at school loves to ask me the question, "what's the takeaway?" I think it is a fair question because we have limited time and a lot to accomplish. So there had better be a takeaway when we are asking students, faculty, and coaches to invest their time in a program, class or activity. But sometimes the outcomes we are looking for cannot be measured on a test or during one season. They blossom over many years in the future.
And so that brings me to our Junior Varsity Field Hockey Game last Friday, August 24th. North Shore Country Day played Highland Park High School and the game started just before 6 pm. It was a beautiful evening, and I was watching from the Forest St. side of the field. This game was my first introduction to a lot of these athletes as a good portion of the team was new to North Shore. Like all JV teams at North Shore there was frequent subbing, and it was noticeable who had played some Field Hockey before and who was playing their first Field Hockey game ever.
I was enjoying watching the sincerity of this Junior Varsity Girls Field Hockey team completely invest themselves in the task of learning to be a team, of giving one's best effort, of being accountable to each other, of learning that winning is an important outcome but it is the result of doing a lot of other things right, and of learning to enjoy the success that comes from authentic and complete commitment to the play at hand.
And the thought went through my head, this is great because the takeaways here are huge.
We are a college prep school and at times it seems we obsess about preparing our high school students for the next step. But I think we do even better work when we are preparing not just for what's going to happen when are students are 18, 19, 20, and 21 but when they are 30, 40, and 50.
Despite whether you believe Lance Armstrong is a doper or the victim of a vindictive "charade", it struck me that on our field on Friday there was no charade going on.
North Shore requires all our students to participate in athletics in the fall of their freshmen year. And in the forty plus years since Title IX passed there has been a lot of research done on the effects of sports participation on girls lives. Here are some of those takeaways that researchers know will happen after a girl participates in sports: higher self esteem, lower teen pregnancy rates, longer life expectancy, better grades, lower risk of obesity, higher rate of educational achievement, and improved employment opportunities.
So despite the fact that the crowd was sparse, the outcome of the game was really only important to the teams involved, and it's unclear whether anyone from either team will ever be much of a star, the takeaways for each girl involved were life changing.
I saw considerable irony that at the same time this ostensibly meaningless game was going on, Lance Armstrong and his team were in damage control to maintain his public image. Friday afternoon I had seen messages from his team that giving was up for the Live Strong Foundation and that Nike was continuing to support him. But these messages rang a little hollow compared to the game in front of me.
Highland Park Junior Varsity got up to a 1-0 early advantage, but North Shore kept the pressure on and soon tied and eventually went ahead to win 2-1. The ultimate takeaways from this game and this season will not be seen for most of these athletes until a decade or more in the future -- likely after we have all forgotten about what happened -- when these then women are long out of school and possibly balancing more complicated challenges of family and career.
This is the type of impressive work that schools should all do, when they have a perspective on takeaways that stretches far into the future. Sadly, the takeaways from the Lance Armstrong debacle are not nearly as positive nor as worthy of emulation.
