As Far As You Know

Today I was invited to present at a conference in Wilmington, Delaware this June: "Managing Institutional Risk at Boarding Schools Leadership Summit." Sounds fancy, so I better think of something to say!

I am up to my eyeballs this week in getting draws up and running for this weekend's New England Squash Championships. The Tournament Committee had its seeding meeting last night, so the real work of getting everything set to go at three different venues is mostly on my plate at this point. Hard to believe this is the 24th time I'll be running this event!

I am traveling through much of New England through some dodgy weather today. I drove to Suffield, Connecticut, to drop off materials for the boys' "C" squash tourney there before trekking up to Exeter, New Hampshire, to get the "A" event underway. (I actually had to stop for about 20 minutes for a conference call related to my presentation at the TABS Risk Management Conference in Delaware this June.) Now that play is winding down here, I will head out with the Choate team for a late supper before driving to West Springfield, Massachusetts, for a night in a motel. First thing in the morning, I get back on the Mass Pike for the trip to Salisbury, CT--the boys' "B" venue--and then back to Suffield before finally joining the Choate girls in Deerfield just after lunchtime; I'll be there through the end of play Sunday afternoon. Whew!

Busy week here dealing with the media. Because three members of the U.S. Women's Ice Hockey Team are Choate graduates, the school has been getting a lot of coverage in the local papers on the airwaves. I've talked to a bunch of journalists and facilitated camera crews and reporters coming to campus to shoot some footage and interview Choate coaches and athletes. Tonight, I am hosting our girls' varsity ice hockey team for a pizza dinner while the gold medal game in women's hockey is contested between the U.S. and Canadian squads. We'll have visitors from the Hartford Courant, NBC Connecticut, and public radio on hand. After tonight, all of this attention should subside, no matter what happens in the game!

Today is a day for catching up after the vortex this past weekend's squash tournaments creates in my life for the week beforehand. In addition to transcribing results from the three sites for the New Englands, there's lots of correspondence and projects I am tackling today now that I have a large swath of uninterrupted time at my disposal.

Choate hosted two ice hockey games today as part of the New England playoffs: the girls' varsity is the top seed in the Division I tournament and beat Pomfret 3-2, while the boys' squad--#2 in the large schools bracket--bested Andover, 4-0. Nice to be able to stay at home and see both teams compete. (I did miss the chance to see boys' hoops play in the Western New England Championships quarterfinal today, though; the Wild Boars lost that one to Suffield.)

While procrastinating the last batch of end-of-term reports for my students, I created some Twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages for the teams I coach. Amazing how productive one can be when there is something else pressing to finish! So you can become a Facebook fan of Choate Cross Country, Choate Squash, and Choate Tennis!

Construction is now underway on the school's new complex of synthetic turf fields. The "double wide" design will accommodate side-by-side field hockey and lacrosse fields and can be configured the other way for soccer or football games under the lights. Just finished a project planning meeting and this is pretty exciting! We expect to have the fields ready to go when school resumes in September.

The school is in the market for new mathematics and science teachers, which means the next few weeks will be interrupted by regular interview slots as teaching candidates come to campus. It's important that I am in the hiring loop in my capacity as athletic director, but this process takes a lot of time and interrupts the flow of my day on a pretty regular basis this time of year.

Choate hosted the Founders League meetings this year, as part of a rotation that includes all members in our group of eleven schools. This entails me coördinating the agenda for athletic directors and our headmaster running the meetings for his counterparts. We gather with our respective groups, and then we have a joint meeting of heads and ADs, followed by a cocktail hour and a really nice dinner. (Whenever the heads of school host each other, the eats are top drawer!)

Today was the last League meeting of the year, and we just wrapped up a pretty impressive dinner. And now I'll happily pass along the organizational chores for 2010-2011 to the next school in the queue.

Just finished a morning Chapel service at St. Paul's School. (We visiting athletic directors, here for our annual Eight Schools meeting--were introduced to the community by the Rector.) It was very nostalgic for me, as I spent four mornings a week in the Chapel of Saints Peter and Paul in my very first teaching job on this campus in the summer after my junior year in college. (Staggering to me how much time has elapsed since then!) After a long time without a visit to Concord, I've been back at SPS four times in the last eighteen months: once with the Choate debate team, once as part of an evaluation team, once with the girls' varsity squash team, and now for the ESAC meeting.

I've been meaning to do this for some time now, but we finally got our act together and had a "Choate Squash" logo with the boar's head silhouette painted on the tins of all ten of our squash courts. Since we host so many national-level events in our facility in addition to a full slate of scholastic matches and tournaments, it seems an appropriate way to promote our program a bit.

A couple of big athletics-related projects underway on campus this summer. Most visible is the double-sized artificial turf surface now being installed behind the Johnson Athletic Center. This field complex will significantly enhance our ability to have field sports practice in just about any conditions and also give us first-rate competition venues for field hockey and lacrosse, as well as the capacity to stage night football and soccer games under the lights.

We are also reconstructing all 14 courts at the Hunt Tennis Center and redoing the landscaping, so that will be like a brand new facility this fall.