April 10, 2011 · 4:55 PM

The Beginnings of Arlington National Cemetery

The Beginnings of Arlington National Cemetery

Arlington House

Union Quartermaster General Montgomery  Meigs appropriated land around Arlington House from its owner Gen. Robert E. Lee in June 1864 for use as Arlington National Cemetery.  General Meigs wanted to make Arlington House uninhabitable for the Lee family by placing Union soldier’s graves right to the front porch. In his excellent documentary,  The Civil War, filmmaker Ken Burns adds that General Meigs had previously lost his son, a Union soldier, in battle against Lee led forces and the appropriation of Lee’s land was particularly satisfying to the Quartermaster General.

I have only seen Arlington by photo or film.  It is a place I must visit before I die. My daughter has been there on a school group trip led by my good friends, and excellent teachers, the Lane Brothers.  She loved Arlington and everything about Washington, DC.  Coach Lane once gave me a football scout VCR tape, on which at the very end of the tape was copied the film he took of the changing of the guard at the Tomb on the Unknown Soldier.  I still have that tape safely stored away.  Incredible. Solemn. Beautiful.

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April 5, 2011 · 7:18 PM

PLAY CALLING

Play Calling by Coach Hays

One of my all-time favorite things about football is play calling.  I loved it as a coach, especially on the defensive side of the ball.  As I was a fan long before I was a coach, I learned the bleachers are the perfect place to appreciate the fine art of play calling.

One solid fact about play calling I learned in my time as a fan was this little nugget of wisdom; Plays called from the stands AFTER the actual play is over have a 100% No-Fail Rate.  Seriously, if a 4th and short iso run play gets stuffed at the line of scrimmage, there are at least 50 guys in the stands hiking up their jeans, sucking in their gut and exclaiming to everyone within a 12 row radius, “I’d a passed right there, a quick slant.”

Now, let’s take the same 4th and short situation.  If the call of a quick slant pass falls incomplete to the turf, those same 50 guys hiking up their jeans in the stands are saying, “Shoulda run the iso, that’s what I called in my head while they was still in the huddle.” This still cracks me up today as a fan and used to cracked me up as a coach.

One JV game night, we played after the freshman squad’s game at our home stadium.  We arrived in the 2nd quarter of the freshman game and we had time, so we let the kids watch some of the game from the endzone before we began warming up.  The double wing team the freshman were playing were moving the ball well.  After a couple long runs, what sounds like a older gentleman from our home stands started screaming “WATCH THE RUN!  WATCH THE RUN!”, in that maniacal voice one often finds in the stands of sporting events.  Very next play, the opponent threw a long play action pass that put them inside our 10 yard line.  Guess what the older gentleman screams now.  “WATCH THE PASS!  WATCH THE PASS!”  Classic.  And the best part was he kept this up well into the fourth quarter.  I giggle just to think about it.

Another play calling story.  We hosted the opening game of district playoffs with our rival and challenger for the district championship in town.  We control the first half against their highly potent (and relatively rare for that time) spread offense, thanks to the secondary gameplan of Coach Smith.  We get the ball back with a lead less than two minutes in the first half and with Coach Smith calling the offensive plays, we methodically move the ball down the field.  We don’t call any timeouts, the clock is running down to half and our plan is to score or hold the ball until the half runs out.  We know we don’t want to give their offense a chance to score.  So, we’re moving the ball, not calling timeouts and for the first and only time I become aware of a fan in the stands screaming, “YOU STUPID COACHES!” over and over again.  Well, screaming is too nice a term.  As I look to the action on the field, the voice I hear emulating from the stands sounds like Mama Alien from Alien 2 if she were to sit in the stands of a high school football game and scream, “YOU STUPID COACHES!” at the top of her lungs.  Well, to make a long story short, led by us “STUPID  COACHES”, we score with less than 10 seconds left, run the clock out on the kickoff and go on to win the game handily.  Not bad for stupidity.

Want  to know what it is like to call plays?   I give you this representative scenario to describe what it is like.

Stand up and hop on one foot around the kitchen while a pot of spaghetti noodles boils over on the stove next to the bubbling pan of sauce and the garlic toast sits on the white hot griddle.  You are hopping because you dropped the heavy pasta pot lid on your big toe.  Then your three year old sextuplets knock over the 20 gallon aquarium and are currently “bathing” in the fish juice soaked carpet.  Next, the doorbell rings and in marches a gaggle of Girls Scouts hawking the world’s best thin mint cookies. Broken toe, dead fish, wet kids, houseful of precious little angels selling fattening discs of chocolate heaven, soggy pasta, charred garlic toast, smoky sauce and …THE PHONE RINGS.

It is Alex Trabec saying that if you can provide the correct question to the clue “65 Toss Power Trap “ within ten seconds you win 1 million dollars.

You get excited, you know this answer and shout into the phone, “Play Hank Stram called for a Chiefs TD in the Super Bowl IV”.

“Sorry, correct answer, but it was not in the form of a question.”

Ladies and gentlemen, that is play calling and that is why I liked it so much.

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March 30, 2011 · 6:54 PM

Brick by Brick

Brick by Brick by Coach Hays

This was the theme of summer conditioning the final year we coached.  I was really proud of this program.  I thought I’d finally found a theme which fit what we tried to accomplish like a glove.  I found the program while cleaning out some folders on the hard drive.  Funny how almost every file in the Tiger Sports folder brings back great memories.  Practice schedules, travel lists, depth charts, strength and conditioning data, it all comes rushing back as I click through the files.  I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did.  And if not, too dang bad, because now I have a whole computer folder full of things to share.

Brick by Brick

The foundation of a solid team is built brick by brick.  Each individual brick in a foundation wall is unique and important.  Every athlete in our summer conditioning program is unique and important to the foundation of the teams we are creating.  The coaches act as the bricklayers to put the foundation together.  Parents, administrators, former players and fans are the mortar which supports and holds the foundation together.  The goal of our Tiger Strength and Conditioning program is to provide the tools so that every athlete can mold themselves into the best brick they can be.

(As I looked over this, it occurred to me that in our final season, some of our mortar didn’t realize, or accept, that it was the mortar and instead wanted to play the bricklayer.  Our bricks were good, our plan was good, but as the wall of the team was beginning to come together, we lost our mortar and our wall crumbled.)

The 2008 Coach Hays Rules of the Road

1.  Show up and work hard, every day.

2.  We will work in groups.  You will choose your own group of 6-10 people.

3.  You will be held accountable to your group.

4.  Compete with yourself on a daily basis.

5.  Be the best you that you can be.

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March 27, 2011 · 11:12 AM

Royals, Flush by Joe Posnanski

Rest Day Read (Sr-79)

Royals, Flush by Joe Posnanski

“You have to go back, in fact, to 2011. The Royals were dismal that year. They were also dismal the year before that and the year before that and the year before that and … well, you get the idea. Kansas City lost 100 games four times in the 2000s. And, oh, the stories from that time! The Royals once had a runner simply fall off first base, like a statue tipping over, and get picked off. They once had a player lose a fly ball in the sun because his prescription sunglasses had not yet arrived. They once had an outfielder who climbed the wall to catch a fly ball only to see it land on the warning track and bounce over his head. They once had their first batter of the game bat out of order.

The biggest problem then, strange as it may seem now (we are talking about the three-time-champion Royals), was that Kansas City had trouble finding, developing and affording good players. How did it turn around? How did the Royals reach the playoffs in 2013, win the World Series in ’15 and then dominate the latter part of the decade? Well, it was that minor league system … that amazing Kansas City Royals minor league system.

Believe it or not, back in those days when human beings played Jeopardy! and people thought LeBron James was going to win championships and Tiger Woods was going to break Jack Nicklaus’s career majors record, people also thought Dayton Moore was a complete failure. Moore will tell you this was mostly his fault. He made mistakes, and he did not explain himself well enough.”

I love the Royals. OK Mrs. Hays, I know I shouldn’t say “love”, especially about my hometown team, the Royals and the Chiefs, but…

Hope spring eternal.  Thanks, Joe P. for this article and providing hope.  This is going to be a rough year to be a Royals fan, but we are what we are.

If you, dear reader, are also a Royals fan, leave a comment with your favorite Royal memory.  Good luck in 2011 to the Boys in Blue!

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March 23, 2011 · 8:48 PM

Shame On Me

“If we, as Kansans and as religious communities, who are committed by our core values to look out for the marginalized and most vulnerable in our society, if we are not paying attention to this, what are we about?  If this doesn’t matter to us, what does?”

“What happens to these folks when nobody is looking?  We need to, as citizens of Kansas, hold ourselves accountable to the value of taking care of these people.  Not just today, but tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.”

-Pastor Tobias Schlingensiepen

Topeka First Congressional United Church of Christ.

This time of the year (tax time) finds me moaning and groaning quite a bit about the money the governments take from me.  This year was even worse than usual, with all the Tea Party Limbaugh Fiscal Conservative-ness floating around nowadays.

I am driving home the other night and listening to Kansas Public Radio.  They ran a locally produced piece from a series they are doing on health care.  This particular piece was a response to the Kansas governor’s proposal to close the Kansas Neurological Institute in Topeka, one of the last facilities for the severely disabled in Kansas.  As Pastor Tobias Schlingensiepen began to talk (Listen at link below) about a sermon he gave, which has taken like wildfire throughout the Topeka clergy community, the lightbulb began to go off inside my head.  Pastor Tobias nailed the very essence of what it means to be a HUMAN BEING, what it means to be a faith-filled member of society.  After several minutes of self-reflection, a shadow of shame crept in and dimmed the light bulb in my head.  I realized I had failed, I had placed my own selfishness in front of those who “marginalized and most vulnerable” people out there who need me to care.  I should be willing to pay, not complaining to pay, the meager tax amount to help provide these citizens and their families a safety net.  I should be doing more.  I should be more Matthew 6. Shame on me.

Clergy Question KNI Closure

For more background

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March 8, 2011 · 8:56 PM

TOUCHING RNA

TOUCHING RNA by Anna Marie Pyle

“The molecular world has always been part of my mental furniture. I grew up on the outskirts of Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, famed for its research on energy, materials, and nuclear weapons. My dad was a physician and biomedical researcher who loved chemistry above all things, and who would interpret all of life’s vicissitudes in terms of some obscure chemical reaction or metabolic dysfunction. Learning chemistry, therefore, became a necessity for basic communication with my father. My neighbors were mostly physicists who would bring home spare bits and pieces from labs around the country. My friends and I sprayed rainbows of color on the bedroom wall with old prisms and played with a cube of depleted uranium metal that seemed impossibly heavy compared with the cubes of iron and aluminum that had been thoughtfully cut to exactly the same size. We were told that the uranium cube was only “slightly radioactive,” which nicely reflects the relaxed parenting attitudes of the 1960s. Our parents represented science as play and as a vehicle for fun. The microscopic world of molecules was as real to us as the grass in our backyards or our pets. We had no idea how lucky we were.”

I really don’t know what to say about this article.  I have read it about seven times just for the heck of it.  Entertaining and informative, right up my alley, baby!.  If the explanations and the science behind the discoveries on the magnificent Swiss-Army knife molecule called ribonucleic acid (RNA) are not enough to intrigue you, how about the opening paragraph highlighted above?  Magnificent work.

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February 28, 2011 · 6:56 PM

Terry Pratchett’s Alzheimer’s Speech

Terry Pratchett’s Alzheimer’s Speech in Full

“Soon after I told the world (about his Alzheimer’s diagnosis) my website fell over and my PA had to spend the evening negotiating more bandwidth.

I had more than 60,000 messages within the first few hours.

Most of them were readers and well-wishers.

Some of them wanted to sell me snake oil and I’m not necessarily going to dismiss all of these, as I have never found a rusty snake.”

Terry Pratchett is one of the most talented writers of our time.  A satirist known for his Discworld series and for GOOD OMENS, co-written with Neil Gaiman, the creations he crafts are extremely entertaining and humorous.  Personally, I just discovered his work not long ago.  I don’t know what rock I have been living under, but I am glad I’ve finally seen the light.

Neil Gaiman may have given Mr. Pratchett the ultimate writer compliment in his comments on working with Terry Prachett on GOOD OMENS.

“Terry is that rarity, the kind of author who likes Writing, not Having Written, or Being a Writer, but the actual sitting there and making things up in front of a screen. At the time we met, he was still working as a press officer for the South Western Electricity board.  He wrote four hundred words a night, every night: it was the only way for him to keep a real job and still write books.  One night, a year later, he finished a novel, with a hundred words still to go, so he put a piece of paper into his typewriter, and wrote a hundred words of the next novel.”

It is a cruel fate with his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.  No matter how prolific Mr. Pratchett can be, there will still be a wonderful tale trapped in his brain without synaptic release for all of us to enjoy.

Thank you, Sir Terry Pratchett, for all you have done and all you will do.  Keep pushing forward.

Humor in the face of tragic news. Hope over despair.  Courage over fear.  And (which would make Hemingway proud), grace under pressure.  Class.

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February 23, 2011 · 8:11 PM

The Viking Laws

I don’t really know for sure who wrote the Viking Laws.  In fact, I cannot even recollect where I originally ran into them, but I am grateful to have found them. There almost has to be some fantastic legend that goes along with their origin. A great wisdom flows through, around and into the Viking Laws, no matter where their origin lies.

The Viking Laws work very well as a road map in a football strength & conditioning environment.  The attack mode and human weapon philosophy required to prepare one to physically, mentally and emotionally compete is mapped out in the Viking Laws.

Believe me, there is a lot to be learned in these 138 words.

THE VIKING LAWS

1. BE BRAVE AND AGGRESSIVE

  • BE DIRECT
  • GRAB ALL OPPORTUNITIES
  • USE VARYING METHODS OF ATTACK
  • BE VERSATILE AND AGILE
  • ATTACK ONE TARGET AT A TIME
  • DON’T PLAN EVERYTHING IN DETAIL
  • USE TOP QUALITY WEAPONS

2. BE PREPARED

  • KEEP WEAPONS IN GOOD CONDITION
  • KEEP IN SHAPE
  • FIND GOOD BATTLE COMRADES
  • AGREE ON IMPORTANT POINTS
  • CHOOSE ONE CHIEF

3. BE A GOOD MERCHANT

  • FIND OUT WHAT THE MARKET NEEDS
  • DON’T PROMISE WHAT YOU CANNOT DELIVER
  • DON’T DEMAND OVERPAYMENT
  • ARRANGE THINGS SO THAT YOU CAN RETURN

4. KEEP THE CAMP IN ORDER

  • KEEP THINGS TIDY AND ORGANIZED
  • ARRANGE ENJOYABLE ACTIVITIES WHICH STRENGTHEN THE GROUP
  • MAKE SURE EVERYBODY DOES USEFUL WORK
  • CONSULT ALL MEMBERS OF THE GROUP FOR ADVICE

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February 19, 2011 · 10:56 AM

Bugs in the Arroyo by Steven Gould

Rest Day Read (SR-75)

Bugs in the Arroyo by Steven Gould

(chapter excerpt from his forthcoming novel, 7th SIGMA. Release July 2011)

“Bugs care about three things, near as Kimball could figure. They loved metal. That’s what they’re after, what they’re made of, what they ate to turn into even more bugs.

You don’t want to have an artificial joint in the Territory. Ditto for metal fillings.

In preference over metal, though, they go after electro-magnetic radiation. This means they love radio and really, any of the humming frequencies caused by current flowing through conductors.

Forget computers, radios, cell phones, generators, and—remember fillings and crowns?—well, a pacemaker, an imbedded insulin pump, a vagal stimulator brings them quicker.

But there is one thing that brings them even faster than all of those, that makes them swarm.

A broken bug is to the territory what blood is to a shark pool. They come in numbers, they come fast, and they come with their coal-black nano snouts ready to eat through anything.”

They say a good writing does not just tell about the action, good writing shows the reader the action. GREAT writing drops the reader into the action, not only telling the reader it is raining, but making the reader feel the drops hit the face.  In BUGS IN THE ARROYO, I felt I was walking around the desert scene looking over Kimballs shoulder the entire time.  GREAT STORY, folks.  Please, give it a try.

I stumbled across Steven Gould’s BUGS IN THE ARROYO around the end of 2010 when I registered to win free ebooks of his novels in a Twitter contest.  I had known him as the author of JUMPER, but that was about the extent of my knowledge of Steven Gould.  After I registered, I went to his website, http://www.digitalnoir.com, roamed around and found a link to this story on TOR.com.  It is impressive to say the least and cranks up the anticipation for the July 2011 release of his novel, 7th SIGMA, from which this story is a chapter of.

Hope you enjoy!

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February 16, 2011 · 8:29 PM

Whose name is written on YOUR foot?

Whose name is written on YOUR foot? by Coach Hays

I sat down in my man-chair.  It was comfortable. It was quiet. It was peaceful.  I was reading some Sherlock Holmes. Life was good.  In comes offspring #2, who plops down on the sofa and turns on the TV.  Toy Story followed by Toy Story 2.  I cough.  Then I loudly clear my throat, but to no avail.  And wanting to avoid an international incident requiring mediators and negotiators, I let the intrusion slide.   I ignored Offspring #2 and went back to reading.

But pretty soon…well, you all know what happened.  The giggling and laughing from the sofa caught my attention and before you know it, the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is safely closed on the end table with me and Offspring #2 both laughing and reciting lines by heart.  (Admit it.  “Positive is positive and negative is negative!” is one of the greatest quotations ever recorded on the intricacies of battery polarity engineering and placement.)

Well, the following morning, in that magical mental place between the alarm ringing and full consciousness wrestling back the proper mental faculties, I had a thought flash into my head with the vivid mental image of Woody looking at the faded name of ANDY written on the bottom of his boot. ANDY.  The name that represents belonging to and being a part of.  ANDY. The name that gives Woody purpose.  Looks what happens to Woody in Toy Story 2 when the cleaner wipes those four letters off his boot.  He gives up trying to get back to Andy and the others. Gives up and floats away from all that is important to him.  When the name disappears, so does the very core of who he is.  Eventually, it takes a monumental effort by his friends to bring him back.

Then came the big question.  Whose name do I have written on the bottom of my foot in permanent marker?  Who do I choose belong to? Who do I choose to give myself up to?  What is the purpose, what is the driving force I stand on?  Is it a name to provide solid footing or is it one that will cause me to slip and fall?  I know now.  After some mistakes and some trial and error (see here), I now know.

God on the right foot.

Faith on the left.

Family on the toes.

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