Mr. Robinson's neighborhood

The United States Little League champions, the team representing Chicago's Jackie Robinson Little League, were stripped of their title earlier today. The league was found to have altered their boarders to include players on the all star team that did not live within the unaltered league boundaries.
I have very strong opinions of very few things. This is one of those things, however.
This news angers me for so many reasons, it's hard to know where to begin.
I suppose the easiest place to start is by simply saying it's anger-inducing because, at the very, very minimum, it disparages the name of a man who did so much for baseball and African Americans in general.
Likewise, it undermines the success, accolades and joy the kids from Jackie Robinson garnered for themselves, their community and for so many people not affiliated in any way with Chicago, Little League or anything else associated with the team.
The message to these kids now is, "hey, remember all that great stuff you accomplished over the summer? Just kidding!" That you would set up a bunch of kids to take a fall like that is inexcusable to me.
Likewise, there were a number of other legitimately constructed teams that lost to this one, missing out on their own story of joy and achievement. True, Robinson might have won anyway, but we'll never know. The underhanded actions of adults robbed the Robinson players of their achievement but also stole the opportunity for the same from numerous other deserving teams.
What angers me the most, however, is what the actions of these deplorable adults have done to youth across Chicago and to the perception of African Americans in baseball.
It's fitting, of course, that the Jackie Robinson players were all black and the team's mere presence in Williamsport was a major milestone that appealed to those wanting a better and brighter future for African Americans in general and, for people like me, grateful that the game is starting to, once again, have an appeal to young, black players.
Prior to Jackie Robinson, of course, Major League Baseball had zero black players. By the time I was a kid, black players were about 25% of the league, compared to just 12% of the country's population. A few years ago, three MLB teams had no black players. Many of the other players of color were Dominican or Cuban, not African American. Historically black colleges, in fact, have started heavily recruiting white players because there simply aren't enough black players to fill every roster.
I was happy, at long last, that young players of color were starting to re-discover the game I love and, more importantly, starting to take advantage of the opportunities afforded to them through the misery endured by people like Jackie Robinson .
More important still, was the fact of what these kids represented to other kids in Chicago just like them. In Chicago, more than maybe any other city in this country, being young and black means your future very certainly involves a prison, a gun or a fatal bullet wound.
The crush of this hopelessness is greater in Chicago than nearly anywhere else in America.
And then these Robinson kids came along and denied all of that. They were able to stand up and show that you can achieve, you can win, you can be a black kid from Chicago and rise above the adversity you face in your daily lives, you can crush the forces pushing you down, earn your way out of Chicago, if only for two weeks in idyllic, rural Pennsylvania, stand shoulder to shoulder with the most talented kids in this country, from Mexico, from Venezuela, from Japan and many other places that routinely turn out top level baseball talent, that you can be from the most difficult of circumstances and still be among the best in the world. They proved that. They made the template for others to follow.
And unthinking, selfish and unscrupulous adults ruined all of that.
As is so often the case, everything great in youth sports was ruined by adults. And what greater crime is there than that?
Selfishness is what it all boils down to. What can I get out of Jackie Robinson's legacy? What can I gain from the success of a pack of 12-year-old kids?
Here's a solution for youth leagues everywhere: put the equipment out on the field and just let the kids play and have fun. Tell the adults to get lost. Kids are fun experts. They don't need adult intervention.
And for the adults, if you really want a trophy that badly, just go to the awards shop and buy one. Or if you don't want to do that, do what these adults did and rob a trophy from someone else.

Mr. Smith goes

I awoke this morning to terrible news. The first piece of information that entered my brain this morning was that former North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith had died.
I've been a long-time fan of Tar Heel basketball and that love was born within me largely because of my admiration of Dean Smith as a coach. In those early years, I had no idea that I would grow up and coach teams of my own.
Looking back, satisfied that I have done the best I could for my teams and players over the years, I can only be thankful I had Dean Smith as a template. Anyone who knows even a little bit about coach Smith knows his players speak with him with reverence and how they credit him with the positive influence he had on their lives. What many people might not know is that coach Smith had a positive influence on a number of people he never met, myself included.
It was financially inhibiting for me to attend the University of North Carolina, but I have always considered myself part of the Tar Heel family because of the important role coach Smith played in my life. I don't know what kind of weird kid you have to be to have a coach as your sports hero, rather than a player, but I valued everything coach Smith did and everything he represented.
It's easy to say he broke what some thought was an unbreakable wins record, went to a ridiculous number of NCAA tournaments, Final Fours or how he coached Michael Jordan or planted a coaching tree that includes the likes of George Karl, Larry Brown and Roy Williams.
But that's not what I admired about coach Smith. Sure, I like winning, but that's not why coach Smith impacted me so strongly. As a kid, you hear about concepts like class and integrity. You know they are good things but it never settled into my brain fully until I started to learn more and more about coach Smith and his approach to life.
He crafted his life on the foundation of a specific set of ideals, call them values, if you'd like. Here are the things I believe in, that I hold true. Coach Smith allowed those values to shape his actions, never acting in a way that contradicted those values, even if it diminished him in some way--like, he'd never violate one of his values just to land a prized recruit. If it didn't fit his value structure, it didn't fit his life. Period.
I later learned that Aristotle set up this same framework as the only true path to what he called self-mastery, becoming the best human you could possibly be.
Guided by values, coach Smith coached to a process. His wasn't a method of 'here's how we'll win this game,' rather, it was a method of 'here's how we're going to do things.' Coach Smith believed that there was a proper way to do things and that the process of doing things properly was the path to success, that defending the proper way, using the right technique for screens and passes, these things cause defensive stops and rebounds and made shots and those things cause winning.
I've tried, to whatever extent possible, to implement these principles into my own life. I try not to focus on results more than process, I try to value the people in my life as much as I can and as long as I can, and I try to let my own values guide my actions.
I only know how great a man coach Smith is, all these years after being exposed to him for the first time as a 12-year-old, by understanding how difficult it is to remain committed to this approach to life. Cutting corners is easy. Looking for shortcuts is easy. Quitting, after all, requires no effort, literally.
But coach Smith never did things the easy way. Instead, he created his own path, forged a new path for all of us and did things the Carolina Way.
A part of me died on Saturday morning. However, because I was smart enough, or lucky enough, to stitch that part of myself to coach Smith, in some very small way, a part of me will live on forever, as coach Smith will live on in us all.