I disagree with everything Menick says in his last post. Since his last post was agreeing with what I say, we have a neat Godelian moment there, eh?
But at any rate, Jim’s right, the community really doesn’t talk a whole lot for a bunch of talkers. I’ve always wondered why that is. Perhaps because it’s a competive activity, and some folks prefer to hold their cards close to their chest. Perhaps because some of the problems we face aren’t endemic, but derive from individuals, and no one likes to call out individuals in public. Perhaps because as educational funding has been whittled away and never seems to bounce back, our community has been cut down to the people who only do it because we love it, and who squeeze it into odd moments of our lives, like Jim and I do. If people like Jim and I could dedicate the normal 40+ hours a week to this game, we’d probably have more leisure to do it right. As it is, we do well simply to do it. People gotta eat.
I’ve long faulted the NFL and the NCFL a bit for not fostering more intercommunication between coaches. Morseso the NFL, since the NCFL national tournament is not exactly chock full of spare time, while the NFL proceeds at an expensive leisurely pace. The NFL tournament is also the annual convention of the coaches, and it’d be nice if we could, you know, do something with that.
There are plenty of issues in forensics, but for the most part we’re a leaderless, voiceless community. We each do our thing in our local community, but there’s little wider effort. I wonder if that’s a chicken and egg problem; if we had leadership, we’d have more resources? It’s hard to say; it’s not like education as a whole lacks for voice and leadership, and we’re sinking as part of that ship, albeit slowly.
The internet provides a good platform for these discussions and I hope we can spark more of them. It’d be even more good if others would contribute; it’d be nice to point to someone as the “sane” coach writer, to contrast with myself and Menick. Maybe coaches are also not writers, or are technophobes, problems Jim and I do not share. But as he points out, if the community doesn’t introspect at all, then it’s simply begun to die out.h