My son sent this one to me. I found it very moving; stories like this tend to restore my faith in humanity. Youth sports can give us all an opportunity to find solutions, share the love and stretch that inspiration muscle….
Nov 122010
Mar 312010
Hockey Cat (Photo credit: foodiesathome.com)
“How would you like to be followed by a video camera, with vivid color and complete sound recording capability, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every day for eighteen years?”
That question came from a desire for a strong metaphor to help parents appreciate the power of their own example. And now there’s YouTube. Frankly, it is not what I had in mind.
I just spent over an hour googling AHL hockey coach Jim Playfair – mostly because I was curious to know who he was before his now-famous stick-breaking, mad dog crazy, foaming at the mouth tantrum on the job. Televised. And by now re-played more than a million times. (OK, go ahead.)
Why did I spend an hour? Mostly because I was sure that, with more than forty pages of results containing almost one million mentions, I would find something other than a link to that YouTube video.
I found a single page with his stats, and another two or three mentions of the fact that he was an Olympic torchbearer. And it took the better part of an hour.
On the other hand, my search for Patrice Bergeron yielded one page linking to articles about his visits to injured high school hockey player Matt Brown… followed by several pages of other types of information.
Role models are important and everyone makes mistakes. Do ‘bad acts’ render us one-dimensional? Do they ‘weigh’ more than kindness and good grace? Or, are we so addicted to the extreme, bizarre behavior that dominates the media that we have we started to think that this type of behavior ‘normal’?
Maybe some of you will take this opportunity to have family discussions about privacy and internet safety and reputation and doing the right thing, even when nobody’s watching. Others might talk about leadership and role modeling and sportsmanship, while others may talk about media biases. There’s a lot to learn here!
By the way, for those of you keeping score at home, buried fairly far down in most of those articles, was an apology from Playfair to parents involved in youth sports — especially youth hockey.
But you’d have to get past the video to see it.
We like SHARING:
Jul 212009
“I’m a water skier, Mom!” With his arms raised high and a smile from ear to ear, those were Matthew’s words as he sailed back to the pier in his adaptive ski chair on Bangs Lake in Wauconda, Illinois.
Inspired by their volunteer work at the Dreams for Kids 20th Anniversary Holiday for Hope celebration, Ron and Liz Roberts had decided it was possible to bring this kind of magic to their “home” lake.
Why not? Liz did what comes naturally: she called, she organized, she planned, and enrolled people. Hearing of what could take place on their lake, each of their neighbors, friends and their kids heard the call and each one answered. In their answers came the simple words, which have defined Dreams for Kids for 20 years: “I can do that.”
At the same time, all across Illinois, there were 50 kids who did not know their lives were about to change. Each of them lives with different strengths and weaknesses; however, unlike many of us, their disabilities have led them to be classified as someone other than “just a kid.” Cerebral Palsy. Spina Bifida. Autism. These are words which society has imposed on them as limitation rather than possibility. They know these words do not define who they are. They know how the world could be.
At 10 am that morning, Ron Richards put his arms around the first kid off the bus, sat him into his adaptive water ski chair and guided him into the water. However, at this moment Matthew was consumed with fear, rather than excitement. His first words were, “I am not going. I can’t do this.”
Having spent his young life with his dreams hidden from view, and no opportunity in sight, Matthew was afraid. As Ron reassured him, that, yes, he could do it, and that he would have the time of his life, Matthew held on tight and trusted that this all could be possible. The ski boat pulled away and Matthew disappeared onto the lake, into a world only he could describe, and one the rest of us could only imagine as we watched from the shore. When we saw him next, Matthew was transformed.
No one will ever forget his smile, and his voice rang proud with words of pure joy – “I’m a water skier, Mom!”
Adapted from an article by Tom Tuohy, Founder and President of Dreams for Kids. For more information on DFK, click here www.dreamsforkids.org