The Council of State Executive Directors met this week in Park City, Utah. The annual gathering focuses on trends and best practices of association management, and mutual issues in the recreation and park profession.
But we are more than just colleagues. We are a gregarious, fun, engaging (and exhausting!) bunch who continually and passionately invests in each other. This is my greatest gang of professional associates and personal friends – my collective, got-your-back brain trust. I appreciate and love them all.
The Special Olympics PA provides year-round sports training and competition in Olympic-type sports for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, giving them opportunities to develop physical fitness, demonstrate courage, experience joy, and participate in a sharing of gifts, skills, and friendship with their families, other Special Olympics athletes, and the community. It’s one they look forward to all year.
And on Friday, thousands of athletes, coaches, families, and friends met at Penn State University for their annual Summer Games. It is the largest statewide competition, attracting more than 2000 athletes and 750 coaches.
It was a real joy to volunteer at the Games, along with several of my co-workers. We were assigned to the Track staging area, helping the athletes get checked in and lined up for their races: 100 meter walk, 200 meter run, 800 meter run and walk, 5000 meter run, and the pentathlon 400 meter dash.
If you’ve never interacted with such pure-hearted people as those who compete in the Special Olympics, seek it out: you’ll be enriched from the experience!
Fifty years ago today, I graduated from high school. Photographic proof: My sideburns and me accepting our diploma from the school board president.
Northampton Area High School does a classy thing each year when it invites alumni who had graduated 50 years previously to attend the current class’s Commencement exercises.
More than 100 of my classmates returned to a reception in our honor, and mingled with vaguely familiar people who reminded us of old friends we used to know! (What a half-century can do to a person!)
Under perfect weather for an evening outdoors, we were privileged to sit behind the graduating class in the very same stadium in which we had last assembled. Each of us was respectfully introduced by name, before ceremonies moved forward with the speeches and business at hand. And at sunset, we stood and sang the Alma Mater with our younger mates, with lyrics that—remarkably!—came back to mind.
Speaking of privilege, the historic day’s other momentous event must be called out. 80 years ago, and 30 years prior to our own day in the sun, boys about the same age that we were then died in the D-Day Operation of June 6, 1944, in the largest amphibious invasion in military history. The sacrifices of our parents’ generation for ours, and for those of today, cannot be overappreciated. We stand on the crucial—and at times sacrificial and heroic—work of those who have preceded us. May it ever be so with each generation’s contributions to the future good of society. Here’s to the Class of 2024!
