They say that hindsight is 20/20, and I believe that without hindsight, foresight will be greatly limited.
This Christmas and New Year's season finds me in the midst of my 38th year as a teacher, and when I stopped to ponder all those years recently, I thought about all the monumental changes that education has undergone since I first stepped into a classroom in 1975.
My first year in teaching saw me coaching several sports and teaching social studies and P.E. That year, as well as most of the early years, at least in my experience, teachers were pretty much left on their own. There were few meetings, not much oversight, and there was a great belief in doing things like they had always been done.
Today, schools here are much more hands on when it comes to seeing that the students being served get the best chance of getting an education that will actually do them some good, at least in our local community.
But, then as now, sports were very important. As a coach/teacher then, if your team won, then you were a good teacher. That type of attitude is not so commonplace now but it was then.
I have had experience with administrators who hated sports, calling it the "tail that wags the dog" and in some places I have been, it was likely true. I taught at one school in 1980 that had the finest athletic equipment money could buy but the geography books I taught from were outdated, falling apart and secured with duct tape.
Athletics is the one arena that generates perhaps the most involvement and concern from parents and patrons. This can be a two-edged sword, leading to both good and bad things but when all is said and done, athletics isn't just about accumulating trophies and titles.
While there are many venues in a school such as ours where students can learn to excel, athletics offers one area that can't be replicated in any other setting. While realizing that most students won't participate in high school athletics, I wish that they did. I have always believed that the most successful schools have the highest percentages of student involvement in their athletic programs.
Athletics, by nature, is physical. It is running, sweating, pressure, repetition and pain, joy and sorrow, dread and high expectation, but most of all, it is hope.
It takes a lot of time to become a good football, basketball, volleyball, baseball, softball player or good runner or track athlete. It takes effort, commitment and hard work and there is no certain tangible payoff if you make the personal investment each sport requires.
However, the greatest payoff isn't tangible but intrinsic. The greatest payoff that our students will receive is the attitudes they will develop toward success and commitment.
The football class of 2013 had a lot of hard knocks coming up but they had a sensational senior year and I truly believe that a lot of them went out from graduation convinced they could tackle anything. Having that belief is the cornerstone of building for the future.
The football class of 2014 was far less successful than its predecessor in terms of wins and losses, but they worked just as hard. This past season saw the 'Hawks begin the season as, well, not very good. They steadily got better as the season progressed and by week 8, outplayed perennial league champion Prairie Grove in a game where dubious officiating cost them the upset.
In each season, the teams played hard, worked hard and were committed. Lessons to be learned from 2013 is that experience is gold, and that talent without experience is diminished. Things will get better as the team will benefit from greater numbers with more experience, which in football is essential to ultimate success on the scoreboard.
However, winning and losing aside, it is the attitude you develop and the social skills along with the physical skills that you learn which will serve you well upon graduating and entering the work force at large.
The past few years has seen a big change at Pea Ridge with regard to just about everything. All indicators are pointing up, whether it be athletics or academics. The Greeks, many thousands of years ago, firmly believed that both the mind and the body be trained and fit to truly be successful. It was true then and it is now.
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Editor's note: John McGee is an award-winning columnist and sports writer. He is the art teacher at Pea Ridge elementary schools, coaches elementary track and writes a regular sports column for The Times. He can be contacted through The Times at [email protected].
Sports on 01/01/2014