Highlight Reel

This is the time of the year when football coaches and scouts visit the school to speak with prospective recruits for the upcoming year. Scouting players is one of the situations where the ones that show early interest can usually recruit the top talent. These coaches have seen highlight reels of the athletes and there's something that they liked. Based on that film, they make a visit and talk to the student, his coach, and his family to tell them about their program. It's an interesting thing to watch as both sides almost flirt with one another. But none of this happens without the highlight reel. 

Football highlight reels have become high-tech. Now they look professionally put together, they identify the player before the play they want you to see, and they are digitally cut and spliced to give you the most action in just a couple of minutes. A player's whole prior season can be assembled into 2-3 minutes and a handful of their best plays. It's a glimpse of how good they can be at their best. But any good coach knows, this isn't reality. 

Highlight reels never show the fumbles, dropped passes, or missed tackles. These are the things that players dread, coaches preach against and fans boo. They happen to every player and it's a real part of the game. To prevent these bad moments, coaches and players spend time planning, drilling, and practicing. It occupies a lot of time and that effort never makes it to a single highlight reel. 

As we begin to close out this school year, we have focused a lot on the places where we have found struggles. Student behaviors and apathy, adaptations in instruction, changes in COVID protocols, and all of the other stressors are where we focused a lot of our time. We tried not to fumble, but sometimes we did. And when we did, we worked to fix it and keep it from happening again. These things took a lot of time, effort, and patience and I'm glad we put that effort in. But what about our highlight reel? If you could direct a 2-minute clip of your best events and moments this year, what would make the cut? I think it's very important to think about that at this time of the year. You've given a lot of time and attention to the problems and needs that you faced, but I'm betting that those efforts produced a lot of really memorable moments for you and your students. Don't forget your highlight reel. It's the parts that show your best impact and it's the moments that everyone deserves to see.