Dave Anderson | Tag Archive | Youth Sports

I love sports. I love youth sports. I love what sports teaches kids. Unfortunately, youth sports can also be a place where young athletes are exposed to the wrong lessons in life.

A previous post on this page even addresses another aspect of youth sports: trophies. But a new phenomenon in youth sports makes me crazy. Placing young athletes at street corners to beg for financial support! Continue Reading…

The Dad’s Against Not Keeping Score Society of Iowa Board of Directors met monthly. Since the local chapter of the DANKS started, little progress had been made. There had been a lot of meetings held but not a lot of decisions made.

The Chairman of the Board was Dan Slakovski. He ran one of the largest bread companies in the state of Iowa. It had been in the family for generations. Continue Reading…

Below is the You Tube video to David McCullough Jr.’s speech to the graduating Class of 2012 at Wellesley High School. This is an in your face yet inspiring speech to the coming generation.

The Bottom Line:

His last words to them are about being selfless. Being selfless is truly the most likely way any of us will become special.

Exercise free will and creative, independent thought not for the satisfactions they will bring you, but for the good they will do others, the rest of the 6.8 billion–and those who will follow them. And then you too will discover the great and curious truth of the human experience is that selflessness is the best thing you can do for yourself. The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you’re not special.

Continue Reading…

You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless. In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another–which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality — we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point — and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole.

No longer is it how you play the game, no longer is it even whether you win or lose, or learn or grow, or enjoy yourself doing it… Now it’s “So what does this get me?” As a consequence, we cheapen worthy endeavors, and building a Guatemalan medical clinic becomes more about the application to Bowdoin than the well being of Guatemalans.

-David McCullough Jr. Wellesley High School 2012 Commencement Speech

I spend a lot of time in the bleachers at my kids sporting events. I love it. I am a gym rat who loves to watch both practice and games. It is one of my favorite things from my childhood that I did with my dad, The Master of The Sword at West Point.

Sometimes as I sit in the bleachers, I witness something that makes my blood boil. I witness a kid dismiss a coach’s advice. They give the coach that “whatever” look or in some cases even verbalize their bad attitude.

I want to jump out of the stands and shake them. I want to say, “Who are you to question someone who played the game you’re playing and has been teaching the game to hundred’s before you!”

What arrogance! What stupidity! It’s just dumb kids though right? Unfortunately, I have seen the same attitude in adults at work, in ministry, and in other areas of life.

I really don’t care what I hear on the news. We do not have an issue with self-esteem in America.

My proof? The American Idol auditions! The fact that some of these people can gripe, scream and even cry on national television because Steven Tyler (Aerosmith: My favorite band!) told them they were not ready for the big time makes my case. Most people have too much self-esteem.