Pacing

UP's director DB often starts Camp training by telling staff that "This is a Sprint and a Marathon." This past week felt like a sprint - to today's accomplishment - and now I enter the marathon. The accomplishment was convening twenty spectacular volunteer coaches and coaches-in-training for the beginning of a year of skills-building, ultimate-playing, and learning more about each other - representative of what we are encouraging young people to do :-)

Leading up to today, this is some of what I did: created/released a survey then analyzed answers, negotiated logistics, swept and squeegied, talked about many different approaches to certain topics, sent bunches of emails/announcements. Finally yesterday, I felt some real clarity about the purpose of the meeting - thanks to SBC for the "Cool Tools for Hot Topics" book recommendation. So the goals were roughly to find some agreement among us as year-round coaches, identify needs we have as coaches and participants in UP, and start to brainstorm ways of addressing those needs.

Naturally, one of the best parts of gathering for this kind of meeting was the quality time with loved ones. We really are a family. Everyone knows a few family members who are notoriously late. Despite that, we had a couple hours of great discussion in different formats, learning about sports for development and peace, brainstorming ways of incorporating values into our activities, and how to communicate with each other. Then we played ultimate on a basketball court - something like 45 minutes of it, yeah! Here's what one workshop today looked like. Happy about the number of people, the diversity of the group, and everyone's energy.