Tag: sports

Little League, Then and Now

But that love for baseball didn’t mean that we organized our lives around the sport, or that any parent with a Little Leaguer had baseball scholarships in mind. It didn’t enter into the picture. A child’s life was not packaged up and dressed for ambition. That meant, too, that the fans did not take things too seriously.

Living the Dream: Unicorn Town

Once upon a time, different businesses and professions in a town would have their own baseball teams and play each other. At a minimum, we could do more to bring back church softball leagues.

The Power of Community: Tracksmith

Tracksmith makes beautiful things and promotes a beautiful vision of the world. So much the better. It is not fast fashion. It embraces the concepts of tradition and place and community.

Wisdom Crieth Without: Features of an Inspirational Speech

We speak to connect with ideas and with the Divine. Of all the speeches I have heard in-person and not in a movie, or play, recording, or manuscript, a few have reached the pinnacle of being inspirational.

It’s Been a Fun Ride

Venus’s love for her sister, and Serena’s recognition of it, has also shown us the transcendent power of family, the possibility of forgetting the accolades and the worldly recognition and the desire for advantage and finding instead deeper connections and possibilities of love.

Against Fun: The Ubiquitous Specter of Youth Sports

More to the purpose of this essay, organized youth sports should challenge students to be dissatisfied with amusement or entertainment in their pursuit of excellence. Our culture is soaked in entertainment, the preponderance being of a low quality. While it can be entertaining, sports also offers an education.

I Sing of Shoes and the Man

But the dark events of that afternoon have remained with me and have prompted a question that I have often wrestled with, fruitfully, I think, but never to a clear decision: Lacking a proper foundation in kickball, what sort of culture, if any at all, could flourish in a Newton, Massachusetts?

Sport for the Sake of Success: A Review of Little Platoons

Feeney’s book is a helpful antidote to the “go to college at any cost” mindset. But more importantly, it examines how this mindset can corrupt the forms of association that allow our communities to thrive and the humans within those communities to flourish.

Ted Lasso as Parish Priest

Ted Lasso offers a compelling model of a good parish priest: this fictional football coach exemplifies how to lead others with care.

Spring Fever

I had bought a few baseball cards when I was eight years old, mostly for the gum, but the start of fourth grade, in 1967, was when I became serious.