Out and About

Last Friday, Maddy and myself went to the Boston Teachers Union to conduct evaluations with the Playworks Junior Coaches at the school. The evaluation consisted of a written and an oral component, and the questions related to the Junior Coaches Leadership Convention (see older posts by Frank, Lucy, and myself for more information on this event), as well as general questions related to Playworks. We also gave a written evaluation to coach Brittany, the coach at BTU. While we were doing this, Lucy and Jarrod were out doing the same thing at the Hurley School, while Meghan was at the Everett School. Evaluations are always a very important part of anything we do here at Sport in Society. It is through evaluations that we determine what we are doing well, what needs improvement, and what is not working. We strive to be constantly improving in anything that we are doing, and evaluations are always an important part of this process.

On Monday, I received confirmation that Northwestern District Attorney David Sullivan will be the first featured speaker at the MIAA Student-Athlete Citizenship Awards Ceremony. The theme of this year's ceremony is bullying, and Sullivan has done extensive work on, and now presides over the Phoebe Prince case, a landmark bullying case. The case involves Phoebe Prince, who committed suicide at age 15 due to extensive bullying, including cyber-bullying. It has been a wake-up call to many people nationwide on the dangers of cyber-bullying. The registration deadline to nominate winners for the event is April 5, please reference the invitation letter on the MIAA website http://miaa.net/msad-boston-invitation.pdf, or e-mail me at blumberg.b@neu.edu if you have any questions.

Finally on Tuesday, three writers from Baseball Prospectus came to Northeastern to answer questions, and sign copies of the latest edition of Baseball Prospectus Annual. Along with their annual book, Baseball Prospectus publishes a website devoted to using advanced statistics to analyze baseball. I do not want to give away too much information on the BP presentation, as there will be a story up on the Sport in Society website soon. I will say that it was a very informative presentation that I thoroughly enjoyed attending.