Middle School Swim Championships

This weekend Holy Child participated in the area swim championships with our comparatively undersized team. With only eleven swimmers, we have been unable to field more than two relay teams all season, which is not necessarily a catastrophe for championships (each team can enter two teams into each of the two relay events), but has held our scoring down a little during our dual meets, because of course relays score more points than individual events.

Jack Roberts (1952-2012)

I have been fortunate throughout most of my life to avoid losing immediate family members, the more so as my immediate family is not particularly large, with three sets of aunts and uncles and just two first cousins. So I'm somewhat numb and in shock right now, and perhaps my words won't really have any kind of flow, particularly as this was not something I was in any way prepared for (unlike my aunt Susan, who had outlived medical expectations by fifteen years). Here goes...

Style Points

Coaches change their styles all the time. Bill Belichick's early New England Patriot teams relied more on a strong defensive unit than they did on Tom Brady and the offense. But as the league rules changed to make life easier for quarterbacks and for offenses in general, Belichick's M.O. became outscoring his opponent, underscored by this particular season, when despite having one of the NFL's worst defenses, so thin that they've been throwing wide receiver Julian Edelman out there as a defensive back, they still managed to secure the AFC's top seed in the playoffs. Coach K at Duke has changed his style too. His first three championship teams revolved around excellent point guard play (Bobby Hurley & Jason Williams/Chris Duhon), multi-faceted wing players (Grant Hill & Shane Battier), and scoring big men (Christian Laettner & Carlos Boozer), complemented by shooters and various role players. His 2010 championship team, on the other hand, lacked a true point guard (both Nolan Smith and Jon Scheyer were scorers) as well as a scoring big man, but K remade the team on the fly to take advantage of Brian Zoubek's excellent offensive rebounding skills and the long-range shooting of Scheyer, Smith, and Kyle Singler.