Chip Shots: Who’s Truly Off For The Summer?
June 9, 2023 at 10:18 p.m.
Chip Shots: Who’s Truly Off For The Summer?
By Chip Davenport-
Athletes have already begun a prescribed number of preseason practices with their fall sports teams. Athletes on the diamond and the hardcourt are beginning travel league competition.
Kids are going to summer school to either fortify their academic horsepower with electives or meeting an obligation required to pass a class they failed in the regular school year. Teachers and administrators will be present for one or two summer sessions.
Teachers and coaches might not be in their classrooms or offices, but they are sharpening their saws for another year of production capability.
The campuses of high schools in our area are chock-full of action, but it’s not at a 100% enrollment level.
The time spent between Memorial Day and Labor Day, for me as it relates to my vocation, is the perfect time for big projects before it’s time to formulate a strategic plan for the next fiscal year. Summer will serve as time to fix things… solve problems… repair kinks in last year’s planning process just to name a few challenges.
I call it Dragon Season. The best time to slay dragons to improve as much around my ordinary course of business so it will be easy to keep the business running while a bunch of my colleagues and I strategize.
The same thing is going on among area athletes gearing up for fall and winter sports.
Vacations, long weekends, and other forms of summer season enjoyment will be part of the mix.
The athletes have regulatory parameters such as limited contact with coaches, certain levels of practice they can undertake, and in the case of football, the strategic integration of full contact versus limited contact “pro pads” days.
It’s a challenge for me to make sure I take sufficient time off in the summer because the ideas and plans abound, but I know people working around me need just as much of a break as I do.
If I don’t block out either a solid week off, or tranches of long weekends or mid-week breaks, I won’t be able to avoid burnout, and when Dragon Season is over, I’ll have little to speak for in terms of continuous improvement.
My saw will be dull, too.
Excessive caffeine, or some other type of ingested goofballs and elixirs would just create a sine wave of energy levels in the office.
Let’s look at swimmers. I am, of course, not targeting them, but the example of varying levels of preparation and conditioning parallel to what I have figured out I need to do as a businessperson.
Swimmers not using performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) reduce the intensity of their workouts closer to an upcoming race. PEDs used for helping an athlete outperform his or her contemporaries is a misnomer. Instead, PEDs are used more for their benefit of recovering from the effects of intense workouts and continuing at those intensity levels right up to competition time.
I worked with an elite triathlete who barely missed Olympic qualification in the 1,500-meter run when he was a younger man. His kids continued with his swimming legacy, and he told me, “If you’re ever around the pool and a swimmer is training full-go very close to meet time, he or she is probably a PED user.”
Students and student athletes will make some great strides this summer, and it’s likely we’ll see these strides in the form of better study habits, greater endurance on the various fields of play at game time, and more savvy in choices made in competition or in the classroom.
A teacher will find a new wrinkle in their curriculum through a summer trip to pair a change of scenery with their professional development.
The advantage of summer is the ability to train beyond the spotlight without the rigors of having the snot knocked out of you in game-time competition. The workouts are very intense, of course, but there is more balance of continued improvement and self-reflection summer affords our students, student athletes, and our teachers.
My wife is a voracious reader within the school year, and the reduced in-class hours while she teaches summer school and the ensuing 5 ½ weeks of solid time off will be a mix of even greater volumes of professional and pleasure reading, and some time in Wyoming off the grid at her sister’s cabin.
Come August, she’ll be ready to rock.
Each of the performance improvements I mentioned – when you witness them in the end product – will be the result of hours of preparation, greater time for self-reflection, and successfully catching up for a fresh start among those kids who struggled in the classroom but learned a valuable lesson from their prior school year.
Athletes have already begun a prescribed number of preseason practices with their fall sports teams. Athletes on the diamond and the hardcourt are beginning travel league competition.
Kids are going to summer school to either fortify their academic horsepower with electives or meeting an obligation required to pass a class they failed in the regular school year. Teachers and administrators will be present for one or two summer sessions.
Teachers and coaches might not be in their classrooms or offices, but they are sharpening their saws for another year of production capability.
The campuses of high schools in our area are chock-full of action, but it’s not at a 100% enrollment level.
The time spent between Memorial Day and Labor Day, for me as it relates to my vocation, is the perfect time for big projects before it’s time to formulate a strategic plan for the next fiscal year. Summer will serve as time to fix things… solve problems… repair kinks in last year’s planning process just to name a few challenges.
I call it Dragon Season. The best time to slay dragons to improve as much around my ordinary course of business so it will be easy to keep the business running while a bunch of my colleagues and I strategize.
The same thing is going on among area athletes gearing up for fall and winter sports.
Vacations, long weekends, and other forms of summer season enjoyment will be part of the mix.
The athletes have regulatory parameters such as limited contact with coaches, certain levels of practice they can undertake, and in the case of football, the strategic integration of full contact versus limited contact “pro pads” days.
It’s a challenge for me to make sure I take sufficient time off in the summer because the ideas and plans abound, but I know people working around me need just as much of a break as I do.
If I don’t block out either a solid week off, or tranches of long weekends or mid-week breaks, I won’t be able to avoid burnout, and when Dragon Season is over, I’ll have little to speak for in terms of continuous improvement.
My saw will be dull, too.
Excessive caffeine, or some other type of ingested goofballs and elixirs would just create a sine wave of energy levels in the office.
Let’s look at swimmers. I am, of course, not targeting them, but the example of varying levels of preparation and conditioning parallel to what I have figured out I need to do as a businessperson.
Swimmers not using performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) reduce the intensity of their workouts closer to an upcoming race. PEDs used for helping an athlete outperform his or her contemporaries is a misnomer. Instead, PEDs are used more for their benefit of recovering from the effects of intense workouts and continuing at those intensity levels right up to competition time.
I worked with an elite triathlete who barely missed Olympic qualification in the 1,500-meter run when he was a younger man. His kids continued with his swimming legacy, and he told me, “If you’re ever around the pool and a swimmer is training full-go very close to meet time, he or she is probably a PED user.”
Students and student athletes will make some great strides this summer, and it’s likely we’ll see these strides in the form of better study habits, greater endurance on the various fields of play at game time, and more savvy in choices made in competition or in the classroom.
A teacher will find a new wrinkle in their curriculum through a summer trip to pair a change of scenery with their professional development.
The advantage of summer is the ability to train beyond the spotlight without the rigors of having the snot knocked out of you in game-time competition. The workouts are very intense, of course, but there is more balance of continued improvement and self-reflection summer affords our students, student athletes, and our teachers.
My wife is a voracious reader within the school year, and the reduced in-class hours while she teaches summer school and the ensuing 5 ½ weeks of solid time off will be a mix of even greater volumes of professional and pleasure reading, and some time in Wyoming off the grid at her sister’s cabin.
Come August, she’ll be ready to rock.
Each of the performance improvements I mentioned – when you witness them in the end product – will be the result of hours of preparation, greater time for self-reflection, and successfully catching up for a fresh start among those kids who struggled in the classroom but learned a valuable lesson from their prior school year.
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