What We've Been Up To: Coach Knows Best

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Coach Knows Best

For the last five years or so I've been volunteering my time with the local track & field team, coaching the hurdlers. Every year is different, but I have yet to have a year that was not extremely enjoyable. My kids get to go outside and play during practice, I get some exercise, and prior to me volunteering there was no coach for hurdles so I figure my advice is better than nothing, right?

Interacting with the hurdling team this year in particular has thus far been a real joy. I have about 12-14 hurdlers (a few not pictured here) and from what I can tell, they all get along well. There are a several seniors, a few freshmen and a good mix of gals & guys. We've only had one meet so far and swept the guy's races and did well in the gals races considering we were missing two returning varsity and it was the first real meet for most of the gals.

I'm really looking forward to seeing all of these athletes develop through the season and hope by the end of the season that they are all fast enough to kick my butt in practice (I'm trying my hardest to stay ahead of them!).

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.
-Theodore Roosevelt