A Tale of Two High School Sports Stories

Leave a reply

The other day I was watching Mike and Mike in the Morning on ESPN 2 (link is to audio of show) and they were talking about the girls high school basketball game that featured one team beating the other 100-0.  They were rightly outraged, not by the score but by the fact that the winning team ran a full court press well into the second half and one of the assistant coaches was openly cheering them on to the 100 point mark.  Some folks emailed in to defend the winning team, but the two Mikes rightly pointed out that there are right and honorable ways to play a game and what the winning team did was not that. It's not that you ask your better players to play poorly, you simply ask them to play differently.  Instead of pressing, work on your zone defense.  Instead of pushing fast breaks, work on your offensive sets and try to only score on the inside.  Whatever, there are ways to play hard and not embarass your opponent.

The flip side of the story are the kids that play the game knowing that they are outmatched but giving it their all anyway.  The losing team in that girl's game is one example, but the Greensboro News & Record recently carried a story that offers an even better example.  The swim team on Greensboro's Smith High School has seven swimmers.  That's right, seven.  The day that the reporter went to see them swim they competed against perennial power Grimsley who had 100 swimmers.  Some of the Smith swimmers didn't know how to swim at the beginning of the season, but they continued to work and improve and one swimmer interviewed in the article saw his 50-meter freestyle time drop from 47 seconds to 32 seconds in one month.  

Two stories that highlight the good and bad of sports.

Normal Abnormal Times

1 Reply

Fec quotes Krugman Jim Collins who essentially said that the second half of the 20th century was abnormally stable thanks to having two superpowers keeping the world in constant, tense balance.  That means that our current state of global economic instability is more normal than the relatively stable late 20th century. However it's what Fec wrote himself that I really enjoyed:

In my case, it’s normal that what few businesses remain choose to outsource their IT functions. For that, I blame Microsoft. OTOH, my best client, who chose to embrace MS, is in their back yards eating their lunch. This leads me back to my original thought: leaving IT problems to someone else is an act of immaturity and evidences itself in other aspects of a business.

It’s normal that manufacturing has gone overseas. For that, I blame our various governments. The founders of Home Depot said some time ago that creating such a business under current regulations would be impossible.

It’s normal that I spend nearly all my income paying for one kind of insurance or another. For that, I blame lawyers and runaway juries.

It’s normal that the banks have done what banks do and are having to pay for it. Scratch that – we have to pay for it.

Finally, it’s quite normal that we’ve elected another charismatic pol and have unrealistic expectations. So long as the above mentioned offenders have lobbyists, one man, no matter how great, can make not a whit of difference.

Anyone else noticed that lobbyists have become the most reviled people in America with the exception of politicians?  Have you also noticed that many lobbyists and politicians start out as lawyers?  Coincidence?

Costco + Clif Bar Recall + Blog = Interview with MSNBC

10 Replies

Not long after I blogged about my love for Costco and the fact that it had been only deepened by a robo-call I'd received from them informing me of the Clif Bar recall, I received an email from an MSNBC reporter named JoNel Aleccia asking me if I'd be available for a phone interview.  The results of the interview can be found in her article Dial-a-recall? Stores use cards to warn buyers.  She was quite nice and she got the parts of our conversation that she used right, except she has my age at 45 and I'm only a young 42.  That's okay, because I look 55.

One thing she mentions is that I received a call about Zone Perfect Bars, which I didn't mention in my first post.  That's because Costco followed up with a second call to inform us about the Zone Bar recall and I emailed that tidbit to the reporter last night.  Of course I'm most appreciative of the call.

One thing I'll point out is that I think I gave Ms. Aleccia a term she used in the story.  She mentions "relationship marketing" and I think she might have gleaned that from our conversation.  She'd asked me if I was troubled at all about retailers collecting data about their customers and using it to track their purchases.  I said I wasn't and that a big reason was I'd spent a good chunk of my career in direct marketing and had even founded and run a newsletter called "Relationship Marketing" that explored how companies use customer data to improve customer retention and profitability.  I also told her I was surprised that more companies don't do this considering how long loyalty programs and customer databases have been around.

Of course I'm going to use this as a case study when I talk to clients about the influence of blogs.  I asked Ms. Aleccia how she came across my blog and she said she'd done a search on a term like "loyalty card recall" and my post popped right up.  She also said that she finds bloggers to be good sources for human anecdotes because they write about their lives in such detail.  Knowing that blogs are grist for the media mill I'd advise company's to pay close attention to them.

Mulhern’s New Digs and Gig

Leave a reply

Mike Mulhern, the Winston-Salem Journal's ex-NASCAR reporter, has his new website up and running.  He tells me that this is phase one and that phase two of his site promises more features.  As it is right now he has a Breaking Now/Hot Scoop section, The Pit Bull's Daily Briefing and Mike's Take: NASCAR In Depth.  He's also posting video via YouTube, which is a great idea.  Looks like he's off to a flying running start.

Go get 'em Mike.

From XBox to Atari

Leave a reply

Remember when George W. Bush's staff moved into the White House in 2001 and found that the Clinton staffers had acted like a bunch of boobs and done things like remove all the "w"s from the computer keyboards and glued desk drawers shut?  Bush staffers didn't do anything like that, at least not that I've heard of, but Obama's staff is discovering that being on the government payroll doesn't guarantee that you'll get to work with cutting edge or even adequate technology.  From a Washington Post story:

One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos…

"It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.

Honestly I'm surprised they inherited Atari and not Pong.

WSFCS Spring Break Schedule and Snow Day Make Up Policy

Leave a reply

The Winston-Salem Forsyth County Schools made it official today by announcing that the day of school our kids missed due to the 1/2 inch of snow on Tuesday will be made up on March 30, the first day of spring break.  It's no surprise that they are scheduling the make up day for March 30 because they literally printed it in the handbook they distributed at the beginning of the school year, but that doesn't mean the policy is smart.  Here's why I think the policy is dumb:

  • The first two make up days are March 30 and 31 the Monday and Tuesday of spring break, and realistically smack dab in the middle of the break since most people who use it as vacation would start on the previous Friday or Saturday. 
  • The final two scheduled make up days are June 11 and 12, the first two days of summer break which are a Thursday and Friday.  Why not make the first two make up days the summer days since most people won't have vacations scheduled to begin on a Thursday or Friday, while many people will have vacations scheduled for spring break?    
Why not default to the summer break as the first make up days?  For those families with both parents working it's one less day of summer that they have to worry about day care. Sure you could argue that they'd have to pay for day care on March 30, but I think many more people will have scheduled vacation on spring break precisely because they had to find someone to watch the kids that entire week anyway.  Why not take vacation and have some fun with it?

Finally, the school administrators know that people will schedule vacation for spring break even though the make up schedule is communicated at the beginning of the year and every year when people complain I'm sure they say, "We told you so!"  Why put yourself in that position unnecessarily?  Like I said, I think it's a dumb policy for everyone concerned.

More Retail Vacancy

4 Replies

My wife just called me from the Harper Hill Commons shopping center at the corner of Country Club and Peace Haven Roads.  She informs me that the Starbucks that had been located there is closed and the Dewey's Bakery shop that had recently opened there is also closed.  I'd read that the Starbucks was going to close but Dewey's closure surprised me. I checked the Dewey's website and they list Harper Hill Commons as one of their holiday locations so it sounds like it was only planned as a temporary location all along.  I'd say it's a sign of the times that Dewey's could find temporary space in a relatively new and upscale location like Harper Hill, and of course it's not a good sign that both the Starbucks and Dewey's locations now sit vacant.

One More Reason to Love Costco: The Clif Bar Recall

3 Replies

I'm an avowed fan of Costco.  I absolutely love shopping there and it is a sign of my adoration that I think my fraternity brother Kirk is a rock star because he's a buyer for Costco.  Another of our fraternity brothers is an actor with a recurring role on the original CSI (he's Archie in the lab), but I honestly think I'd ask Kirk for an autograph first.  If nothing else I'd ask to trade jobs with him before anyone else I know.  So yes I love Costco.

Today we received a robo-call from Costco, but unlike the calls I got from John McCain this one was welcome.  Their records showed that we'd purchased Clif Bars in a certain time period and they wanted to inform us that Clif Bars were being voluntarily recalled in connection with the peanut butter salmonella scare.  In other words they'd scoured their database and found any members who had purchased Clif Bars from them and then called them to let them know that they should dump those Cliff Bars.  They also provided a way to get information directly from Clif Bars about the recall.

Obviously not all retailers can do something like this.  They don't all have a membership database like Costco, but what's interesting to me is that many of them do have loyalty programs like Food Lion's MVP program.  I'm wondering if they have the capacity to mine their MVP data and see if any members have purchased tainted products and then contact those customers?  I doubt it, but even if they did I don't know that they'd actually think to do what Costco has done.  

Did I mention I love Costco?

If It’s Good Enough for the White House…

Leave a reply

The big news in the world of online geeks is that WhiteHouse.gov has gone the way of blogs. I'm sure much of the excitement stems from bloggers feeling vindicated after years of being denigrated and belittled by everyone from their siblings to the main stream media.  After all, if it's good enough for the office of the President then it's gotta be good enough for them, right?

Who knows if the White House blog will end up doing anything meaningful, but I'm a firm believer that public officials can do a much better job of communicating with their constituents if they utilize every means available and blogs are very effective tools to consistently get information out directly to constituents.  Heck, I feel so strongly about this that four years ago I offered to host a blog for any Winston-Salem or Forsyth County official who wanted to start a blog.  The only person that contacted me was Vernon Robinson, and he posted one or two items but then it kind of died off.  Still, I'm prepared to help any public official who feels the need to follow the White House's lead.  So I'll re-submit the offer: any public official in Winston-Salem or Forsyth County who wants a blog just give me a shout. I'll be happy to help.

The City’s Eyesore is a Man’s Treasure

2 Replies

The city leader's of Winston-Salem would like to have the ability to use eminent domain to take at "fair market value" properties that they consider eyesores and then either raze it or rehab it as affordable housing.  I have real problems with eminent domain being used in this way because there have been cases in some cities where people have lost homes that they were living in because the city took them using eminent domain because they wanted the land for an office building or some other use.  To me this is plain un-American.

Another problem is that city governments are made up of people, civil servants, who are as apt to make mistakes as any other group of people.  When they have the power to tear property down, well, at some point they might tear down the wrong property as highlighted in this story from Detroit.  

Sure there are eyesores and negligent owners out there, but they should be dealt with using the already existing channels that the city government has at its disposal, like fines or condemnation.  I don't think we should punish owners who keep their properties in a habitable state, but that we or our government finds not so attractive state.  Remember, one man's trash is another man's treasure.