Potpourri, And A Happy IHSAA New Year
July 2, 2021 at 11:28 p.m.
Potpourri, And A Happy IHSAA New Year
By Chip Davenport-
This week feels much different once you don’t have a dog in the fight for the upcoming high school football season. It’s usually a quick break to get a weekend at my sister’s and brother-in-law’s home in Ohio for some lake life fun before getting home and getting right back to the rigor of preseason football practice and conditioning.
It dawned on me my summer plans aren’t affected by the IHSAA calendar anymore. It’s bittersweet!
I really enjoyed watching or hearing about my son’s progress as he rolled through summer workouts and a few pre-season exhibitions and scrimmages. Now he’s a working adult, however, and his evenings are free to join us for a dinner out after a hard day’s work. The opportunities for his company, as well as my daughter’s company, after work for dinner, to watch a ballgame, to run errands, and to just visit are greater in available time than I thought they would be.
I’m going to enjoy the upside of a summer where we can make weekend travel plans or home project plans without an evening of practices and scrimmages. Last summer, aside from two trips to my aforementioned sister’s place with family-only interaction, it wasn’t a – dare I say - normal summer.
I went to a poetry reading three weeks ago. It was an open forum, with rants, excerpts from the books of published authors who were in person to read their material. My wife’s colleague, John Homan, facilitated the session. He introduced us, and I mentioned I did some freelance sports writing with a weekly column to boot. I explained my column wasn’t always a deep dive into sports, but instead a bridge of memories, current issues, and other aspects of life and opinions tied into sports; sometimes very loosely.
Homan asked me if I had anything to read to the audience if they had extra time. I read a Chip Shot column. What the hell, right? I read my April 3, 2021 column, “Miss Ellen Hijacks Chip Shot.”
I was pleasantly surprised by the chuckles and the compliments after the event I received from a mix of the crowd who mostly weren’t ardent sports fans. Homan punctuated my return to my chair saying, “I know Ellen, she works with my middle-schoolers, and I can hear her voice and see her body language as Chip read his column to us.”
My bigger takeaway was the presence of faculty at the reading. English teachers in particular. I thought about how they were at the poetry reading to hone their craft, or even impart feedback and knowledge in the same manner Warsaw’s head football coach, Bart Curtis, is a featured presenter at numerous flexbone/triple option football coaching clinics.
Curtis is entering his 31st season as a head coach, but as an educator and administrator, his core value of lifelong learning is quite evident. Curtis also attends practices during spring break at service academies with his staff in tow to hone their skills required to reload a successful football program with a new cast of characters at the on-field controls of a very disciplined offense.
The poets who also serve as educators are doing the same thing. Some mentioned how they changed a poem or passage they read after some mentoring among colleagues and other writers and poets. They demonstrated their lifelong learning values, inherently in place among almost all educators, in the poetry and spoken word version of a coaching clinic.
My perception of what I was going to see at the poetry reading prior to arrival was a bass, some bongos, and some beatnik finger-snapping. I witnessed all three, but the takeaway from a pleasantly surprising experience was how the open forum including some educators from non-athletic backgrounds and interests were sincerely interested in making each other better in the same matter coaches on the gridiron do.
This week feels much different once you don’t have a dog in the fight for the upcoming high school football season. It’s usually a quick break to get a weekend at my sister’s and brother-in-law’s home in Ohio for some lake life fun before getting home and getting right back to the rigor of preseason football practice and conditioning.
It dawned on me my summer plans aren’t affected by the IHSAA calendar anymore. It’s bittersweet!
I really enjoyed watching or hearing about my son’s progress as he rolled through summer workouts and a few pre-season exhibitions and scrimmages. Now he’s a working adult, however, and his evenings are free to join us for a dinner out after a hard day’s work. The opportunities for his company, as well as my daughter’s company, after work for dinner, to watch a ballgame, to run errands, and to just visit are greater in available time than I thought they would be.
I’m going to enjoy the upside of a summer where we can make weekend travel plans or home project plans without an evening of practices and scrimmages. Last summer, aside from two trips to my aforementioned sister’s place with family-only interaction, it wasn’t a – dare I say - normal summer.
I went to a poetry reading three weeks ago. It was an open forum, with rants, excerpts from the books of published authors who were in person to read their material. My wife’s colleague, John Homan, facilitated the session. He introduced us, and I mentioned I did some freelance sports writing with a weekly column to boot. I explained my column wasn’t always a deep dive into sports, but instead a bridge of memories, current issues, and other aspects of life and opinions tied into sports; sometimes very loosely.
Homan asked me if I had anything to read to the audience if they had extra time. I read a Chip Shot column. What the hell, right? I read my April 3, 2021 column, “Miss Ellen Hijacks Chip Shot.”
I was pleasantly surprised by the chuckles and the compliments after the event I received from a mix of the crowd who mostly weren’t ardent sports fans. Homan punctuated my return to my chair saying, “I know Ellen, she works with my middle-schoolers, and I can hear her voice and see her body language as Chip read his column to us.”
My bigger takeaway was the presence of faculty at the reading. English teachers in particular. I thought about how they were at the poetry reading to hone their craft, or even impart feedback and knowledge in the same manner Warsaw’s head football coach, Bart Curtis, is a featured presenter at numerous flexbone/triple option football coaching clinics.
Curtis is entering his 31st season as a head coach, but as an educator and administrator, his core value of lifelong learning is quite evident. Curtis also attends practices during spring break at service academies with his staff in tow to hone their skills required to reload a successful football program with a new cast of characters at the on-field controls of a very disciplined offense.
The poets who also serve as educators are doing the same thing. Some mentioned how they changed a poem or passage they read after some mentoring among colleagues and other writers and poets. They demonstrated their lifelong learning values, inherently in place among almost all educators, in the poetry and spoken word version of a coaching clinic.
My perception of what I was going to see at the poetry reading prior to arrival was a bass, some bongos, and some beatnik finger-snapping. I witnessed all three, but the takeaway from a pleasantly surprising experience was how the open forum including some educators from non-athletic backgrounds and interests were sincerely interested in making each other better in the same matter coaches on the gridiron do.
Have a news tip? Email [email protected] or Call/Text 360-922-3092