There's A Lot To Be Learned On The Playing Field, Too

Sitting through Wednesday night's School Committee meeting at the it was clear that there are no easy answers as to how the school committee and superintendent Dr. John O'Connor are going to balance next year's budget.

Like our parent's used to warn us "someone's gonna end up crying."

Well, as a sportswriter, coach and parent of two pretty good little athletes, I vote that it's somebody other than the Tewksbury High athletes who get handed the tissues this time.

At the risk of waxing philosophical for a minute, let me remind my reader(s) of the values intrinsic in participating in high school sports. I know what you're thinking here, "another washed up ex-jock trying to live vicariously through his kids." But work with me for a minute here.

Shortly after I graduated from college I was hired as the Sports Information Director at Salem State College. Being only a year out of college myself I became friends with a great group of Salem State basketball players, and my closest friend at that time was a street smart kid from New Britain, Connecticut named Tommy Thibodeau. "Tibs" was neither your prototypical college student nor your prototypical college basketball player. He felt much more comfortable in the gymnasium than he did in the classroom, and at 6-2, 220 pounds, he was too short to play forward and too slow to play guard. He had a lousy outside shot and a vertical leap measured in millimeters. But he had a heart as big as a lion.

On the basketball court, Tibs' best offensive weapon was this illegal arm-hook move, where he backed his defender down close to the basket and then flung him to  the ground with one arm while going up for a lay-up with the other. Lay-ups were the only shots Tibs could make.

But with just three weapons in his arsenal -- hustle,  desire and the arm-hook move -- Tibs averaged double figures his senior year and led the Salem State team to the Mass.  State College Athletic Conference championship and an NCAA tournament berth.

Tibs wasn't the smartest kid ever accepted at Salem State either, but he worked just as hard at his studies as he did on the basketball court, and he got his bachelor's degree. He stayed on at Salem State and studied for his masters while he served as a graduate assistant helping coach Joe Lavacchia, then coach Don Doucette, run the basketball team. Two years out of college, Tibs became head coach at Salem State.

And two years later  Harvard University coach Peter Robey hired Tibs as an assistant, and as they say, from there the rest is history. Tibs went from Harvard straight into the NBA as an assistant to Bill Musselman when the league expanded into Minnesota. He coached in San Antonio, Houston, Philadelphia and New York before 'returning home" to Boston in 2007.

If you haven't caught on to who Tibs is, he's former Celtic associate head coach and present Chicago Bulls head coach Tom Thibodeau.

So what's this got to do with Tewksbury's school budget problems?

Well, let me assure you of this. If not for high school athletics, Tibs never would have gone to college. And if not for college athletics, Tibs would probably still be known as a street smart kid from New Britain. Maybe he'd be running a successful plumbing business, or maybe he'd be paying his rent taking bets on UConn basketball games.

What I do know is this. His high school basketball team kept him in school and his college coaches taught him a love of the game that manifested itself into an incredibly successful coaching career.

So how many Tibs' are there at Tewksbury High right now?

Who knows?

But I do know this. If we keep raising athletic fees to help balance the budget, and in doing so we keep driving kids from families with limited means away from high school athletics, we're much less likely to see the next Tibs come out of Tewksbury. Ever.

Dr. O'Connor and the Tewksbury school committee have spoken courageously over the last month about finding big chunks of money to cut from the budget so they don't have to lay off teachers.

But  while I'm a big fan of Dr. O'Connor and the fresh approach he's brought to the Tewksbury School system, I have to think he's taking the easy way out when he talks about raising athletic user fees to $250 per sport. I sat in the stands at the boys basketball game with Kathy Semenza Tuesday night, and she and her husband Mark have got three fantastic kids at the high school who each play three seasons of varsity sports. Craig is a senior, and Shannon and Sara are twins in the freshman class.

Raise the athletic fees to $250 per athlete, per season, and Mark and Kathy will have to pony up $2250.00 per year, while they are saving for college, to pay athletic fees.

Makes that extra couple hundred dollars on your water and sewer bill look like the proverbial drop in the bucket, doesn't it?

And even more important than the money it would cost to participate are the intangible, but invaluable life lessons that our kids would miss out on if they weren't doing sports.

There is no way to measure this but I am a firm believer that scores of our kids learn how to learn on the soccer or football fields much more so than they do in the classroom. And I'm not necessarily saying that Brian Aylward and Steve Levine are our best educators (but, then again...), I'm just saying that the kids they coach on the football and soccer fields truly want to be there.

By contrast, many of these same kids only show up in the classroom at the appointed time because the law, or their parents, say they have to.

I'm willing to bet that scores of kids pay more attention at football practice than they do in the classroom, every single day. I'm willing to bet that dozens of kids graduate from Tewksbury High every year having learned more from their coaches than they have from their teachers.

Sure, the coaches have an advantage. Sports are fun. The challenge is addicting. Winning is exhilarating. If our educators had the same "draw" in the classroom as our coaches have on the playing fields, then they'd get through to a lot more kids.

But the teachers don't have that edge, and the coaches do. I'm certain that many, many kids learn how to learn much more so between the hours of 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. than they do from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Overcoming obstacles, working together as a unit, striving to improve your personal performance, learning how to rebound from failure -- these are all the lessons that are learned much more dynamically on the playing field than in the classroom.

It may be a four-year accumulation of tiny bits of information that add up to a moment of clairvoyance for one kid, or one significant, fleeting moment where the winning goal or the game-saving catch convinces one of our kids that he's got the stuff to go somewhere in life. Not in sports, just in life in general.

And if you drive kids away from the arena in which they are exposed to these experiences, tell me where else they are going to get the same chances. Please.

Sure, the top students will always find inspiration in the classroom. The 31 kids who were honored Wednesday night for getting perfect scores on last year's MCAS tests are probably going to do fine with or without sports. But what about the other 4,000 kids in the school system?

I know there are hundreds of parents out there who can tell stories about how their participation in high school athletics had an immeasurably positive impact on their life.

The school committee is going to hold a public forum on the budget cuts next month. The self-professed academics will be there calling for the elimination of all non-classroom activities.

 I hope some of Tewksbury's former athletes will come and tell their stories, and tell the school committee to stop balancing the budget on the backs of Tewksbury High athletes before Tewksbury High athletes become extinct.