Taking a College Tour

One of the most important things to remember about the college admissions process is to remember that you’re always being watched. This is no different on tours. Tour guides can submit reports on the prospectives they show around and they going in the admissions folder along with the interview reports, transcripts, etc. Obviously, having a tour guide write a nice recommendation is not going to get you in if you don’t have the grades, but it can help separate you from others.

Be prepared to think on your feet. Some tour guides will have a funny question or icebreaker during introductions just to get to know the prospectives a little better. When I give tours, I like to ask what students like to do for fun. These are not evaluative questions – there isn’t any one right answer – but there are definitely some wrong ones. Yes, the following are actually answers I’ve gotten on tours:
- “Talk on my cell phone”
- “Hang out with my friends”: Seriously now, who doesn’t like to hang out with their friends?
- “I don’t have much free time”: Well, what do you do with your time? If you don’t enjoy anything that you’re doing, you’re wasting your life away. Sure you won’t enjoy everything
- “I don’t know”: Whenever the tour guide gives you a chance to talk, they’re giving you a chance to stand out. You don’t have to come up with some ridiculously unique activity, just something that shows you are passionate about something.

Some better answers:
- “Play soccer/basketball/football/etc.”: This is a solid answer, especially if you are considering continuing the sport in college. The tour guide might either: a) be on the particular team or b) know someone on the team. If the guide is on the team, you can make a personal connection with the guide so they are more likely to remember how wonderful you are and what a great addition you could make to the school or they might even be able to set up a meeting with the coach. Most admissions offices will have the office phone numbers but coaches aren’t usually in the offices over the summer. If a tour guide is on the team, they might have the coach’s cell number. Numerous times over the summer when someone mentioned that they ran track or cross country I was able to call the coach and set up a meeting that day. If the coach couldn’t meet then, they’d usually tell me to give their CELL number to the prospectives to call them. Even if the guide isn’t on the particular team, they might know someone on the team who they can put you in contact with – and that’s information you’re not going to get from a college’s web page.
- “Participate in Model UN/Student Government/something that you would like to continue should you come to this college”: When prospectives say they enjoy participating in something that they plan to continue in college, it shows they’re most likely doing it because they enjoy it rather than just resume building. Similar to sports, they may be personally involved with the activity or may know someone involved so they can give you an inside scoop on how the activity works at the university.

On the tour, show some interest. Many times the tour guide will be VOLUNTEERING their time to show you around. When you give up an hour of your day to show someone around, they appreciate it when you show some genuine interest. The most boring tours I’ve given are when I have only one family and the kid seems to be just along for the ride. Even simple things like making eye contact can help show your interest.

One of the best ways to show interest is to ask RELEVANT questions. Whether they like to admit it or not, most good tour guides will have some type of routine that they follow on the tour and most of them will cover almost all the relevant parts of the college experience; which means there’s no reason to interrupt the tour guide to ask about Greek life while the guide is talking about the business school. However, when campus housing is covered, it would be a good opportunity to ask about how many students live on campus or if it’s guaranteed for all four years.

The best questions are ones that go beyond simple facts that could be looked up online. Tour guides are not impressed when prospective students ask “So how many students go here?” because that just means the prospective didn’t do their homework before visiting the school. It only takes short amount of time to do some research and find a unique club or activity you might be interested in if you came to the particular school but your interest can leave a good impression.

After the tour, be sure to thank your tour guide. If they give you an email address, shoot them a quick email to thank them for their time. Even better, send them a note. Believe it or not, these can end up getting filed in your admissions folder. Will a thank you note alone be the difference between being accepted and rejected? Probably not. But when you are applying to a competitive school, a trend of courtesy – thank notes to your tour guide, your interviewer, anyone else who you met and took some of their time to talk to you about the college – might be the difference. Most competitive colleges will receive many more qualified applicants than it has room for in its class, so you need to stand out in almost any way possible.


Quotables:
“Do you really have to say “Hi” to everyone? I mean, isn’t that impractical?” – a not so socially minded prospective student on a tour in response to the Speaking Tradition

“I assume the Honor System covers cohabitation?” – a mother innocently wondering how roommates getting locked out for hookups was handled

Me: “There are numerous upper classmen who voluntarily come back early to help the freshmen move in. Typically, cars don’t even get to come to a complete stop before they are surrounded by five to six upperclassmen asking ‘Where’s the stuff going?’ The parents tell them, and then watch joyfully as their child’s stuff disappears.”
A few sentences later…
Mom: You were just kidding about the freshmen’s stuff being stolen, right? Don’t you have some type of honor system here…?
Me: When I said “disappears” I meant it disappears from the car at a very rapid pace and is moved to the freshmen’s dorm room…

Subdued Dull Sunday

As I was leaving after tutoring a student last night, I asked him if he was going to watch the Super Bowl this weekend. He said maybe. When I asked him who he wanted to win he said, “The Cowboys, if they’re still in it.”

Now, I’m not about to claim I can tell you who played in every Super Bowl, or even the winners of the last five. But when an eighth grade guy wants a team to win that didn’t even make the playoffs, the NFL has a big problem. It doesn’t take an advanced marketing degree to tell that teenage adult males should be a major demographic for the NFL – in the regular season! The Super Bowl used to transcend demographics. When I was growing up in Chicago, there was even a nun known for predicting who would win.

Where did the enthusiasm go?

The NFL is forgetting about the most important consumer – Joe the fan. Ticket prices to NFL games – or any pro game these days – are rising faster than the stock market is falling. Fans attending the game drive all other sources of revenue. TV? If the deadline for selling out the tickets hadn’t been extended, the Detroit Lions Thanksgiving day game wouldn’t have even gone on the air. Merchandise? Who wants to wear the jersey of perceived sellouts who play in stadiums full of only CEOs and company presidents? Corporate sponsors? What good are billboards in the stadium if only nobody comes to see them? Heck, companies won’t even buy ad time if the games get blacked out.

Even though you might technically get a better view of the game on a flat-screen TV than from the cheap – well, less expensive seats, there’s an amount of loyalty that being there creates. When I was growing up, my family never had season tickets or even great seats, but I was almost always lucky enough to go to a game or two at Wrigley Field. Sometimes it’d even be a standing room only ticket to squeeze in against the fence, but I was there, burning in the sun, hearing vendors yell “Peanuts,” and seeing Sammy Sosa run out to right field and way to the fans – and he was waving to me. Yes, me and every other fan in the bleachers, but anyone can tells you talking to someone on a webcam is different than communicating with them in person.

No amount of number crunching marketing geniuses can calculate the importance of giving all fans a chance to attend games in person on the bottom line. I suspect that if you broke down the number of games fans of different incomes were able to attend, it would look similar to the wealth distribution – the richest 10% of fans make of 80% of ticket sales. The bottom 50% - maybe 5% percent of the tickets, and as the economy worsens, that number is going to shrink and the number of diehard fans are going to plummet as well.

In previous years, ads would be sold out by Thanksgiving. This year, there’s still airtime left. Are you kidding? I’ve never even heard of another event that people dislike but will watch anyway just to see the commercials. Yes, the tickets have sold out, but a number of the pregame parties have been cancelled. General Motors, a major, longtime sponsor of the NFL dropped their annual event. Bah, its just a bunch of old car dealers, right? Think again – even Playboy’s Super Bowl party was cancelled. While some may think this beneficial, the trend is certainly not. And unless teams remember where their revenue ultimately comes from, NFL games stands won’t have too many more fans than a Pop Warner game.

Ignorant Inclusion

Like so many other ideas in education, it’s a great idea: put all students in the same classroom because every student adds value to the classroom. It’s the perfect cop out answer because it requires minimal effort and nobody can argue against it without appearing heartless on the surface; if someone does, they are arguing that some students don’t add value. It’s like a lazy zookeeper arguing that gazelles and cheetahs belong in the same exhibit because all animals add value and anyone who disagrees simply doesn’t like animals or doesn’t want to deal with different types of animals.

I am all for including students at the highest level they can achieve at, but when students are put in classes that they can’t compete, it is nothing but a disservice. In one of my better classes, I had a number of the top students in the school, including one who didn’t miss a question on an assessment until the third unit exam. There was also one of the sweetest autistic kids I have ever met. For Christmas since he knew I liked to run, he got me a pedometer. Yes, it looked like it came out of a happy meal, but it was the most thoughtful gift any student has gotten me. However, while others were busy acing my tests, this student was too busy drawing beautiful dragons to circle the answers to multiple choice questions.

Without extra support, there’s no way students with extra needs are going to thrive in this environment. However, schools simply don’t have the resources to adequately serve these students. The IEPs – supposedly individualized plans for each student – were of minimal assistance since most looked like they had been copied and pasted from a standard form. Goals were about as specific as a presidential candidate’s proposals and about as realistic as the Lions winning the Super Bowl. Worse was the fact that case managers communicated with me less often than a deadbeat dad. While I’m sure there are some slacking case workers, I can only imagine the caseload they are expected to manage. My only contact with a case manager all year is documented below:

Location: Lunchroom, as I am on lunch duty
Case Manager (CM): Mr. Keenan?
Me: Yes?
CM: Do you have (insert student name here)?
Me: Yes…are you his mother?
CM: No, actually I’m his case manager.
Me: Great! I’d love to talk to you to get some ideas for how I can keep him focused in class and get him to answer questions instead of drawing on his tests.
CM (needing to leave): I’ve got strategies to help with that. I’ll get back to you and we can meet sometime.
Me: Wonderful.

One teacher told me at the beginning of the year never to fail a student with special needs – for my own protection. If all of a student’s special accommodations aren’t met to the letter, I was warned, the teacher is held responsible – but apparently an artificially inflated grade covers academic shortcomings better than Estee Lauder covers blemishes. Many of the students I had should have had an extra resource teaching assisting in all of their core classes. As a social studies teacher, I was a core teacher but students in my class didn’t get a resource teacher like they did in math and English but I was still expected to be able to single handedly support my students. I felt like an already bankrupt state who just got yet another unfunded federal mandate dropped on them.

In the end, it’s the kids who need the most help who end up suffering. No, it won’t be easy – or cheap – to give these students the support they need, but throwing them in any old classroom is like throwing an untrained person in a science lab and thinking the reason the person doesn’t succeed is because of laziness or blaming the lead scientist for not bringing out the best in the team. Is throwing money always a solution to problems? Of course not. But carefully directed funds to relieve overworked case workers and provide additional support for educators – whether it be in the form of resource teachers or pull-out classes – would be a great start down the path to giving all students the education they need and deserve.

Feeding Your Family

Gilbert Arenas must be kicking himself right now.

With the economic downturn and families counting every penny, who wouldn’t want another $16 million coming in? Just over six months ago, Arenas signed a sub-maximal contract for $111 over six years with the Washington Wizards instead of the $127 million he was offered. Even so, it is still the sixth largest contract since the start of the collective bargaining agreement in 1999.

"What can I do for my family with $127 million that I can't do with $111 million?" he told The Washington Post.

At first glance, Arenas signing for less than the maximum contract so his team could sign higher quality supporting players seems like a rare selfless act for a professional athlete who for once wants to be a team player. However, on closer examination, it shows the disconnect between premier athletes with multi-million dollar contracts and the rest of society on multiple levels.

Sixteen million dollars is a lot of money regardless of how much you currently make. Most people won’t make sixteen million dollar in their lifetime, let alone in a single contract. But the number sixteen million is so abstract so here are some numbers that might put it in perspective: Sixteen million could buy you over 213,000 general admissions tickets to Wizards games that go for $75, or over 1000 pairs of club seats that sell for $7,500 each. It would take almost 1,000 hours for the minimum wage-earning janitor that cleans the MCI center after Wizard’s games to earn enough for just one.

According to an NBA players association statistic, about sixty percent of NBA players go broke within just five years of ending their playing careers. This group includes players who lived off of sweatshop wages like Latrell Sprewell who once turned down a $21 million dollar contract because he “had a family to feed.” Putting that $16 million aside into a savings account earning just 3% would leave Arenas with an annual income of $480,000. No, it’s not quite the same as the over eighteen million a year he’ll make with his current contract, but if he’s paid off his house and car – err, houses and cars, living off of $1,300 a day can’t be that hard when the world lives off of little more than that per year.

Perhaps the problem is the heights – in terms of fame and finances – to which we have elevated athletes. We take children without a college education and expect them to make wise decisions with money and fame and the same time Bernie Madoff is scamming educated investors out of $50 billion sounds as brilliant as third graders who have just completed a D.A.R.E. class to bring down Columbian drug cartels. When your first paycheck is for a million dollars, it’s hard to fathom that the money will someday stop flowing. While future NBA stars are serving their one year in college, perhaps they should be required to take a financial management class complete with guest lectures by Mike Tyson, Jack Clark, and Johnny Unitas. Properly done, that one class might be worth more than whatever “major” O.J. Mayo and Kevin Love had at USC and UCLA (multiple Google searches failed to turn up either of their majors).

I’m all for a free market and people earning all they can, but when a twenty-seven year old can blow off sixteen million dollars as chump change something’s awry. His team spirit is admirable for a pro athlete, but if the NBA – or any other professional league – is going to flourish, especially in economic downtimes, it’s not the players’ families who they will have to pay attention to, it’s the poor fans who are on the verge of being shut out of arenas because they can’t afford to sit in the nosebleeds with their kids.

Paying for Passing: Why Social Promotion Will Crush American Society

If a pharmaceutical company skimps on research and releases a drug that wasn’t ready for market, the bottom line might look better for a few years. But eventually, health problems will afflict users, lawsuits will hit the company which will cost millions if not bankrupt the company, taking with it jobs and the dollars of innocent investors.

When a business runs a deficit for a year, they must make it up the next year. When debt builds up year after year, it becomes nearly impossible to catch up and the company goes belly-up, taking with it jobs, pensions, and the money of investors.

Why should we think a school where students are pushed forward when they aren’t prepared will end up any differently?

When a student fails a grade but is passed on, he or she carries that learning debt into the next year. For skills that build on each other, especially basics like math and reading, it becomes much more difficult for students to learn new material because they don’t have the prerequisite abilities, leaving them even farther behind. Eventually, the student declares academic bankruptcy and drops out.

Almost anyone who manages others will tell you people don’t do what is expected of them, they do only what is inspected. If this is true of adults, how much more true will it be of students who have not developed an internal drive to achieve? When a school says “you must pass or you will repeat the grade” yet students continue to move on while failing year after year, actions speak louder than words and these actions scream “academic achievement isn’t important” to students more than willing to hear that message.

Proponents of social promotion argue that students who are retained are more likely to drop out. Of course they are! That’s like hypothesizing that drug addicts in therapy are more likely to be unemployed. Is it because the addict is in therapy that he or she is more likely to be unemployed? No, it’s because the addict already has many problems to overcome. Rarely are students actually held back – an Atlanta Journal-Constitution study found that most students in Georgia are promoted despite a law banning social promotion – and the students that are held back have severe deficiencies to overcome regardless of how they are aided.

Another problem is “gateway” years come along too infrequently. Even in states with supposed bans on social promotion, students only have to show proficiency in selected grade levels. In many states, eighth grade is one such year. If I sailed along until eighth grade and was suddenly told I needed to bring up my reading level three grades in one year, over course I’d be overwhelmed because the system failed to tell me learning in sixth and seventh grade was important. Sure, my teacher probably told me I’d need these skills later, but “later” was too far away when I could play football or Wii instead of doing homework or studying for a test.

Schools want to more students to pass and less in- and out-of-school suspensions, and while this is a well-intentioned goal, too often it results in letting academic standards fall by the way side and ignoring discipline problems for the sake of inflating numbers. In business, sketchy accounting practices can cover up a poor year to keep the stock price inflated. Eventually, the truth will come out and an Enron-esque crash will follow, affecting not just those involved, but also rippling through the business world. The effects of the crash of the education system will be wider-spread. Sure, for now we can hide behind improving passing rates and lower disciplinary incidents, but unless “passing” once again becomes a synonym for “learning,” the effects will continue to worsen and society will suffer.

Students are capable of learning, but when expectations are so low, it’s no surprise that children choose the bare minimum to scrape by. In a world that is increasingly requiring a college degree to earn a living wage, issuing high school diplomas to students who lack the skills for college and the workforce and expecting them to become productive citizens is no better than the army sending an untrained civilian to the battlefront with nothing more than a flintlock rifle and expecting to win the war.

Playoff Problems

As the complaints of college football’s lack of a playoff system finally subside, talk about the NFL playoff system heats up as a 9-7 team has found its way to the Super Bowl while an 11-5 team watched the playoffs at home. Sounds like the BCS inviting 9-4 Virginia Tech while leaving out 11-0 Boise State. Why do we have playoffs to begin with? While most people would probably answer, “to determine the best team or individual in a competition,” playoffs don’t do that at all. Sure, it’s a sure-fire way to create a clear winner, but does ending the season on a four game winning streak make up for a lack-luster 9-7 regular season? Or is it merely gold-leafing a piece of lead?

If you want to determine the best team during a season, playoffs aren’t the way. Look at the English Premier League or almost any other world-class soccer league and you won’t find a playoff. At the end of a long regular season, whichever team is at the top of the table wins the league. No, it usually doesn’t provide the glitz and glamour of a winner-take-all finale but it rewards consistent performance over the course of the entire season. Obviously, it would be impossible to play a thirty-eight game regular season in college football like the EPL. American football will always have this problem because you simply can’t play enough games. Some type of championship would be necessary or a season could last longer than Mike Flynt’s collegiate eligibility.

So how can you fix the college system? If you really want to determine the best team over the entire season, not just who’s hottest in December and then cools off less during the month off between the end of the regular season and the bowl season, the fluff games are going to have to go. That way, the best teams will be playing consequential games the entire year. This year’s championship featured two historically dominant football powerhouses – Florida and Oklahoma. So why had these two teams never met before, not just this season, but ever in their history?

Most teams, with good reason, don’t play the toughest regular seasons possible. Ignoring conference blowouts for the moment, how much did obliterating the Citadel 70-19 or steamrolling Hawaii 56-10 really tell us about how Florida stacks up against other top teams in the country? Are they more impressive than Penn State’s 66-10 dismantling of Coastal Carolina? Where does Oklahoma’s 57-2 cakewalk over Chattanooga fit in?

To those who point out that common games can help compare teams, I say why not have the teams play it out on the field? By comparing common opponents, USC should have been no match for Penn State since it lost 27-23 to Oregon State while PSU pummeled the Beavers 45-14. When they met in the Rose Bowl, it was the Nittney Lions who were overmatched. Texas Tech beat Texas and Texas beat Oklahoma, so therefore Texas Tech should be Oklahoma, right? Nope, the Sooners obliterated the Red Raiders 65-21.

Drop the powder-puff games from the schedule and make an eight team playoff. Or at least drop one and make a four team bracket. And while using the BCS standings for seeding is ok, please figure out a way for an undefeated Utah team to have a chance to win. If college football is set against a playoff, at least trim the fat and play thirteen hard-nosed games against teams that actually matter. With a four or eight team tournament, there will still be plenty of debate over who deserved that eighth spot – just look at the arguments over who should be in and out in March Madness. There will still be plenty of “what ifs” to debate until the spring practice starts, and the team that wins won’t have to answer a barrage of questions of whether or not they are truly national champions.

Back in Black...and Yellow

The black and yellow “Livestrong” jersey will be taking to the road in pursuit of more than cancer awareness. Lance Armstrong will be returning to competitive cycling again for the 2009, looking to win yet another Tour de France. While critics and supporters alike question whether his comeback is a good idea, Armstrong had already succeeded. In the same way that college football succeeds in drawing excessive attention by using the RNG (random number generator) rankings to select a supposed champion, Armstrong’s announcement that he will return to the Tour will generate a more than proportional response about cycling and this year’s event.

Does Armstrong have anything left to prove to cement his place in sports history? He’s arguable the greatest cycling champion ever – even the guy who bike is in storage until gas hits $10 a gallon can tell you he won seven titles. Few red-blooded American sports fans will take notice of someone riding a bike, but throw in the element of proving American dominance over Europe and you’ve got yourself a hero. His seven titles are more than the all riders of any other country save France, Belgium, Spain, and Italy. If it wasn’t for Armstrong, American riders would have fewer titles then those of Luxembourg! He has less to prove to the world than Usain Bolt did in the last 20 meters of 100 meter dash this summer.

Armstrong’s return to cycling in his black and yellow Livestrong kit has already created a buzz that has resonated with a different audience than the echoes from a thousand fundraising dinners could ever reach. No die-hard SEC football fan or Big East basketball guru will end up at the Tour de France’s website, much less a cancer website of a rider. But Armstrong transcends cycling, and just maybe some of those fans will be intrigued enough to read about a former champion coming out of retirement. After all, who doesn’t like a good comeback story?

Equally important is that no responsible journalist could splash a hooded Armstrong, shrouded in mystery, across a major sports website without mentioning his foundation. No comeback story is complete for a sports fan without what drives the athlete back to competition. In the same way that sports fans read Mark Cuban’s blog to find out what goes in his head, they will surf to livestrong.org to find out what Lance does when he’s not on the bike. Who doesn’t want to fight cancer? Especially when its as easy as clicking a facebook group. Very few college kids are interested in writing a big check for cancer research, but a facebook group speaks their language.

The number of fans watching to see Lance win his sixth title and the number of cynics circling like vultures waiting for Armstrong’s failure will breathe new life into a race that for the past few years has been irrelevant save its scandals. Sure, baseball has suffered from the Roger Clemenses and football from the Michael Vicks, but they also have the Josh Hamiltons and Matt Ryans to save them. If Armstrong races clean and succeeds, he could be the messiah figure cycling needs, not to thrive, but just to survive. Armstrong’s revival of cycling probably will last about as long as Michael Phelps’ popularization of swimming, but he can reach a whole new generation for cancer awareness.

I wish Armstrong the best in the actual race, but his winning or losing the Tour won’t matter nearly as much as the conversation he generates leading up to the race. Heck, it might be better if he is competitive, but doesn’t win it all to keep people questioning whether he’ll return in 2010. The more talk the better for Armstrong, cycling, and cancer research. As long as he doesn’t test positive, he’s already won the PR battle. And compared to cancer and the media, the Tour looks like a cakewalk.

Coming Out Early

For the first time ever, all top three vote-getters for the Heisman trophy will be returning to college football. That this is the first time all three are back should come as no surprise, given that the award is given to the best college football player, and the jackpot contracts that await the top picks. However, there has been more talk recently of a non-finalist choosing to leave college after completing his senior collegiate season.

Is it such a disappointment that Mark Sanchez is leaving “early” for the NFL? Can anyone in college football seriously ask anyone in his position to stay? Pete Carroll, Sanchez’s now former coach at USC, seems to think so.

According to Carroll, history shows quarterbacks who come out early don’t do well in the NFL. And, given Carroll’s coaching credentials, I’ll concede that point. But in business – and professional sports are certainly a business today – the customer is always right.

Who is the customer? The people paying the salaries – the NFL teams desperate for a quarterback to save their franchise. There were some seriously woeful teams this past year. Teams like the Lions would love to find this year’s Matt Ryan, and will shell out the cash accordingly. Sanchez just picked apart the Penn State defense in the Rose Bowl like a kid picks broccoli out of a salad. You can’t get a much better last audition than that.

With Sam Bradford, Colt McCoy, and Tim Tebow all returning, the only other highly touted quarterback in the draft is Georgia’s Matthew Stafford. Regardless of whether Stafford or Sanchez is the first taken, there will be multi-million dollar contracts for both of them. Even Sanchez slips until late in the first round, last year, the 29th and 30th picks of the draft signed contracts of 11.5 and 12 million, with six million guaranteed, over five years. If he happens to be taken in the top ten, last year that meant at least twice as much guaranteed money.

With the Heisman triumvirate – and others – coming out next year, Sanchez might not even crack the first round. And that’s if he stays healthy. As we saw with Tom Brady, even the best pro quarterbacks are one awkward tackle away from a potential career-ending injury. Sure, in order to sign the next blockbuster deal, the draftee will need to perform. But if he doesn’t, it can’t be too hard to live off a few million for the rest of your life.

For those purists who believe college athletes should be students first and athletes first, I ask what are students supposed to be learning? As much as college should shape a person’s character, ultimately the student should leave college with skills to be successfully employed. Sanchez will certainly be employed next year.

In case the NFL folds and he needs to find a new job, did I mention that he’s also going to graduate with his degree in communications this spring? Since Sanchez redshirted his freshman year, he’s been spent four years in college even though he’s only a junior in terms of eligibility, and in that time managed to amass enough credits to graduate – something many non-athletes take five or more years to do. Shouldn’t Carroll be applauding him for fulfilling his role as both a student and an athlete, even if privately he’s disappointed that he’ll have to chose from among the top rated high school quarterback and a top recruit from 2006 who transferred to USC and spent last year redshirting?

Carroll does an excellent as a college coach, and he is handsomely rewarded for it with his own multi-million dollar contract. Is it too much to ask for him to wish his players well when they seek the same payday?

My Musings

So I am currently unemployed - looking for work but in this economy it might be a while. To help make productive use of my time, I'm going to start blogging, hopefully on a daily basis, on a variety of topics - sports, schools, jobs, anything really. Feel free to suggest topics.