Specialization? Not Yet

Two of us are off to take a look at another college this morning, this one beginning with the letter "W." Then it's a 2 1/2-hour drive back home and, weather-be-willing, a sprint up the Connecticut River valley another hour for our second-round Little League tournament game. Busy day, so there likely won't be any more blog updates today.

This week's mail brought letters to both of those certain Hanover High student-athletes that I meant to share an excerpt from yesterday:

In this era of sports specialization, it is important for student-athletes to develop their athletic abilities by participating in as many sports as possible. The enclosed Three Sport Athlete certificate recognizes those who share our opinion.

Count me as one who shares that opinion.

Email has delivered next fall's Hanover High cross country schedule and the news is pretty good. After seeing only one race last year because of Green Alert commitments, I should have a chance to catch a few of the biggies in that certain runner's senior year.

Amazingly, the team is running in an invitational in Connecticut on the morning of the Yale game in New Haven. The well-regarded Manchester (NH) Invitational is on the morning of the game at UNH, which should work out. The state championship meet in Manchester is on the morning of the game at Harvard, and even that could be doable if the race is run early enough. New Englands are in Connecticut on the day of the game at Brown. There's no guarantee Hanover will make it that far but after winning New Englands two years ago and finishing second last fall, there's a good chance. It's probably not workable, but we'll see.

A funny column from the Orlando Sentinel begins this way:

Maybe Bernie Machen thought this was a preseason football poll.

In filling out a U.S. News & World Report survey evaluating the nation's colleges, the University of Florida president gave his school the top score of distinguished.

He scored Florida State and the University of Miami as good, which is one notch below strong, which is one notch below distinguished.

In other words, he gave himself an A and his rivals a C.

And then it gets interesting ...

He rated UF above four Ivy League schools: Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania.

"If cost was not an issue and only the quality of education mattered, and you had a chance to go to Dartmouth or Florida, which would you choose?" asked Rollins President Lewis Duncan, former dean of the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth.

That's easy: Florida!

And this ...

Says U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, an FSU alum, "I have it from a good source that Bernie also votes in the BCS poll, which explains a lot."