David
Boldt Takes his Mask Off
I
started the SCISL weblog after witnessing the basketball championship game
between Christian Learning and Cambridge in 2007. That was the first year that
I was fully retired from journalism and a short stint teaching history at
Cambridge, where I had also been athletic director and swimming coach. (We got
up to third in the department in my time, and the team has done even better
more recently.)
I thought that this was probably the best basketball game played in
Santa Cruz that year, and if people had just known about it a big crowd would have
come to watch (maybe even buy tickets). There was a decent crowd at the
championship game though far from capacity – Christian Learning could always
turn out its fans – but I had been amazed, and somewhat saddened, by the sparseness
of the crowds at many regular season games.
So that was the idea. It was sort of a variation on the theme of the
movie “Field of Dreams,” where farmer Kevin Kostner hears a voice in his
cornfield saying, “If you build it, they will come.” So he builds a baseball
diamond in his cornfield and sure enough, people do come. My thinking was that
if I just built up awareness of the game, people would come. It would be like
high school sports as I remembered them.
It was not as easy as I had hoped it would be. There was a bigger
cultural change involved than I had counted on. But there was progress.
Christian Learning, whose parents are largely American, continued to turn out a
crowd, Cambridge was able to build up its fan base (notably the “mothers’
corner”), and even Cooperative was making progress during the most recent
soccer season when the student government made it a goal to increase
attendance. But the stands at International never contained more than a handful
of fans (though academic director Amanda DuPlessis was almost always on hand).
But for the most recent basketball season things at Cooperative and
International seemed to go backwards. Cooperative’s gym was mostly empty,
except for teachers and administrators, as Ana Peredo makes poignantly clear in
her comments in the “forum” above. (In her note to me accompanying those
comments she added that she also spoke for her classmates and teammates, Carla
Limpias and Sofia Sotelo.)
International’s gym was even more
depopulated, which, in a way, was understandable. Those big losses were no fun
to watch, even for the winning team. I only saw one of the 100-plus games, but
the striking thing to me was not how amazing it was, but how boring it was,
despite the two baskets a minute scoring pace. International didn’t even put up
token defense. There was a total lack of triumphalism on the part of the
Cambridge team I saw win, which seemed to regard playing the game as a dirty
job, that somebody had to do.
It may have been a little different at the Cooperative girls game in
which the Jaguars scored 102 points. Scoring over 100 points against someone
was a goal the team had set for itself. “We wanted to do it before we
graduated,” one of the players told me. They got the opportunity, and they took
it. And they were not the least bit sorry.
Less remarked on, but possibly as telling, was the collapse of the
International track teams last season. The Griffins had once ruled this sport,
but this year their girls came in second, and the boys (dare we say it?) last.
It had to be a very frustrating year for the school, and perhaps doubly so
because it was a year in which Cambridge, under the direction of ex-International
coach Eduardo “Presi” de la Riva, was in
a clearly ascendant phase.
De la Riva has barely been mentioned in all this, but it is my informed
guess that his change of schools from International to Cambridge had a lot to
do with the problems that broke apart the League. For instance, when International
athletic director Eli Vilar made her strange, and not-so-wonderful little
speech about gringo schools and Latino schools at the athletic directors
meeting, she started off by announcing that she was switching into Spanish to
make sure everybody understood her.
The only person in the room who doesn’t speak fluent English was de la
Riva.
I don’t know why International wanted to withdraw, other than that they
had trouble fielding a boys basketball team this year. I´ve heard reasons. They
just don’t add up. Supposedly Cooperative is going to play in the Friendship
Games against other Bolivian “American Schools,” and against an American School
in Asuncion. I just hope no Cooperative student tries to pass off on his
college application two weekend tournaments against weak, inexperienced teams
as an “athletic achievement.”
The question arises at this point in regard to game attendance: So what?
What does it matter if you give an
athletic contest and nobody comes? Ana Period gives one answer, but I think
there’s an even more important one. There is actual research showing that sports
strengthen school communities.
Why? Because it is a time when students, teachers, parents, and
administrators get together on something other than a formal administrative or
academic occasion. Parents and teachers can talk to one another, and get to
know one another, in a context quite different from a parent-teacher
conference. Teachers get to see another side of their students. Students get to
meet and talk to their teachers as “real people.” The game provides an easy
conversational context.
As anyone who read the book, saw the movie, or watched the TV series “Friday
Night Lights” knows, there are times in the US when the heat generated by high
school sports competition gets excessive, but I don’t think the SCISL ever got
close to that point despite all the talk about “irregularities on the part of
Cambridge.
One of the insinuations made
against Cambridge was that the school had, over the past seven years been what
might best be described as overly welcoming to two students who also happened to
be outstanding athletes.
First of all, I don’t believe the
insinuations are true, and no proof was ever offered. But secondly I would ask,
“What’s wrong with that?” Both were regular, full-time, properly enrolled
students with passing grades whose biographical information was fully disclosed
and accurate. Where was the crime?
My favorite coach in SCISL history was Chad Jackson, who led the Eagles
to championships in 2008 and 2009. (I like to call it the “Jacksonian Era.) While
other people at his own school would worry that Cambridge had “invited” new
players into the League, Jackson always hoped
that Cambridge had. He was as disappointed as Cambridge coach Victor Coronado
that Cambridge star Juan Manuel Salas had moved to Lima for Salas’ senior year
in 2009, because Jackson could see that would seriously weaken Cambridge. Jackson
had a good team, and he relished the idea that they would be challenged. That
was a spirit that was missing from much of the rest of the League.
As time passed, and I got to know the relative strengths and weaknesses
of the four English-speaking schools in the League (two of which my daughter,
now 14, has attended), my “Field of Dreams”-type visions widened. I suggested
privately that there were other areas in which the four schools could
co-operate. Indeed, it seemed that each school had failings, but together they
could offer a pretty complete range of high school extracurricular activities.
Why not have, for example, an Arts Week Festival? Christian Learning and
Cambridge have strong theater programs. The other schools do not. Cooperative
has a good and improving band. The other schools do not. International puts on
what is reportedly a dynamite program of Latino folk dances. None of the other
schools do.
If they all got to see one another’s achievements in these areas, couldn’t
there be a cross-fertilization that enriched everyone? Maybe International and
Cooperative could start theater programs and there could be a play contest.
Maybe an all-school concert band could be created. It seemed as if all kinds of
opportunities were there for the taking.
But the dream is gone now. Some people think there’s an easy fix – new leagues.
I don’t think it will be that easy, partially because there really are cultural
divides. Sports programs are not a part of the Bolivian tradition. (They are,
however, a part of the “Latino” tradition. I am given to understand that
schools play sports against one another with gusto in other South American
countries.)
Numerous, sincere efforts have
been made to attract other teams into the SCISL over the years without success.
The costs, in money and effort, turn out to be too much. The variance in
ability between schools in the League and schools outside it has gotten too great.
Before joining the League, Cambridge competed in a tournament put on by
another school in which scoring 12 points in a basketball game was considered a
big deal. Hard as it may be to believe in this era of 100-point blow-outs, that
was true at the beginning in the SCISL too. The improvements in techniques and
tactics that have been achieved in the SCISL are truly remarkable. I don’t
think there are many schools that can play at that level in any sport other
than soccer.
There’s another factor as well. An important part of any league is
traditions and history. In writing for
the website I always tried to get across the idea that today’s players were
part of a continuum, a historical flow; that there were people who had come before
them, and others who would follow who would be aware that there games were
matched up against those of the Christian Learning-Cambridge basketball rivalry
of the early 21st Century, and so on.
The great Cooperative girls soccer and basketball teams will be
forgotten, or, worse, become irrelevant. Gone will be the fun of arguing over whether
some future girls volleyball team was as good as the International team of
2011. Speaking of girl’s volleyball, will there ever be a comeback like that of
the 2009 Christian Learning girls, who went from last place during the regular
season to winning the championship. Will anyone remember it?
For myself, I liked the years when things were the most even, even that
crazy 2008 boys soccer season when more than half the games ended in ties,
after which International and Cambridge tied in the championship game . . . in
the overtime period . . . and were still tied after eight players had taken
their turns in the penalty shoot-out.
And just who was the greatest
all-time boys basketball player: David Hwang of International? Juan Manuel
Salas of Cambridge? “Big Juan” Peredo of Cooperative? Or Danny Canavari of
Christian Learning?
It will be a long time before the teams in the new leagues can start
thinking about such things.
Finally, I have indeed been wounded by claims that the story I largely
authored on the break-up has been called ¨biased¨ by high officials at certain
schools. To the best of my knowledge, I wrote it right down the middle. And,
believe me, I know how to write a biased story. (I was not named editorial
writer of the year in Pennsylvania for nothing.) If I were to slant it, for
instance, would have put the nonsense about the “gringos” and “Latinos¨ in the
first paragraph, not the 18th
But truth to tell I was indeed offended by the way International and
Cooperative ambushed Cambridge at the meeting, with no warning, no explanation
of the charges against them, and no day in court. I am quite certain the reason
that there was no proof offered is that there really wasn’t any that could have
stood up in “open court.”
I realize that this is very gringo-ish of me. There really is no reason
to think that the US Bill of Rights should apply in a meeting of Bolivian
athletic directors – a closed meeting at that. If this means that I am biased
on the side of justice and fair play, I guess I do have to plead guilty as
charged.
(David Boldt, faculty advisor to the SCISL website, is a retired
journalist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He has been Editor of the
Editorial Page of “The Philadelphia Inquirer,” and a staff writer for “The
Washington Post” and “The Wall Street Journal.” While he was editor of the
Inquirer’s Sunday Magazine, that publication won three consecutive Pulitzers.
He has been named editorial writer of the year and columnist of the year in
Pennsylvania by the Associated Press Managing Editors organization. He has also
won a “citation for excellence” from the Overseas Press Club for his coverage
of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and an award from the Education Writers Association
for columns on school choice. He lives in Santa Cruz with his wife, Kelly
Clark, and daughter, Julia. Boldt both bats and throws right-handed.)
