As much as I love what I do as principal of SLA, there are big huge parts of my life as a classroom teacher that I miss every day. The biggest thing I miss is coaching. I love sports, and I love them for a lot of reasons. I love strategy, I love stats, I love the Xs and Os, but most importantly, I love sports as a metaphor for life. Show me a sports movie where the underdog comes back to win, I’m a mess. For example, if I find Rudy or Rocky on TV, I’m in.

I’ve been lucky enough to stay in touch with a lot of the basketball players and Ultimate players who played on the teams I coached over the years. You have to understand the atmosphere we played in… Beacon didn’t have a gym or field space. My girls basketball team practiced in another school’s gym at 6:30 am every morning. The Ultimate team used to climb a fence (with scary spikes, I kid you not) to get onto the dirt-encrusted outfield of a baseball field on 55th and 12th Ave. at 6:30 in the morning. (Finally, after many years of that, the caretaker of the park gave us the key to the gate.) You had to want it. You had to want to play. You had to want to work. You had to want to push yourself. There was no space for withholding a piece of yourself from your teammates, because why would you get up that god-awful early in the morning if you weren’t prepared to care?

Many people used to ask us, "How could you get up that early for practice?" For us, the answer was easy, "How could you not?" In all those years, for all of us, 6:30 am – 8:00 am was our sacred time. It was when we came together to work to become so much more than together than we were apart. We drilled and drilled and ran and almost never just scrimmaged, because, well, it’s not the point. You have to work on something to get better.

I loved the classroom, but I think I did my best teaching on the court and the field. When we do it right, we teach sacrifice, we teach community, we teach honesty, we teach patience, we teach listening, we teach learning by doing, we teach humility, we teach passion, we teach love, we teach so many of the personal skills we hope our kids will embody when we coach.

And coaching made me a better teacher and person. In the end, it wasn’t about winning and losing — although I hated to lose — it was about playing as well as we could. And for me, it was always about honoring the effort those kids put forth on the practice fields and courts. If we lost because the shots didn’t fall or the team was better than we were or it was just "one of those games," I could live with it. But if we lost because I wasn’t good enough, if I got out-coached, or my practices didn’t prepare the kids well enough, that kept me up for weeks. (And yes, there are a few games that — years later — I still question what more I could have done.

There are so many stories from my coaching days that illustrate how much those times meant to me. One of my favorites was when we were on a bus back from a boys’ basketball playoff game. We had lost the day before, and we were there to support the team. They lost a heartbreaker, and as their coach got on the bus, he kiddingly said, "O.k. — practice tomorrow after school!" And three of my girls said at once, "How come THEY get to keep practicing!?" The boys’ coach looked at me and said, "I know why you love your team."

6:30 am was our badge of honor. It meant we wanted it more than anyone else. It meant we cared. I miss that time every day.