Dear Berwick Community, Our students were blessed with an incredible addition to our campus this past summer. When it first became clear that Berwick had a small group of donors who wanted to make a turf field project possible, I immediately knew there would be dozens of practical benefits: practice time, drainage, dealing with our climate, and maintenance were among the appealing aspects of this project. Now that we have experienced a full season on this field, I know that I vastly underestimated the intangible and unexpected benefits this initiative would offer in the areas of school spirit, school pride, and institutional confidence for the future. Suddenly our students seem to be turning out in record numbers for athletic contests, and this fall we enjoyed a spectacular undefeated EIL run by our Boys Varsity Soccer team on this immaculate new “home of the Bulldogs.” Their results were inspirational, but how they chose to play the game was far more noteworthy. During the current academic year, our community is now deeply engaged in our NEASC accreditation selfstudy process, which focuses on the Berwick mission with razor-sharp acuity. This has spurred our trustee Mission and Culture Committee to review our mission with virtually every constituent in the school. Not surprisingly, these conversations lead us quickly back to the founding concepts of Berwick Academy, which include an unwavering commitment to “virtue and useful knowledge.” The first group that this committee chose to engage was the students, and it was heartening to hear how deeply they seemed to cherish this notion of virtue at BA. Within minutes of engaging our trustees in a conversation about what virtue means at Berwick Academy today, the students quickly turned to the realm of athletics. These students were uniform in their clarity that, at Berwick, issues surrounding character and sportsmanship were so much more critical than our wins and losses. In their minds, athletics also taught them critical lessons about resiliency, dealing with disappointment, and learning how to be competitive in a very public arena.
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As Head of School, I can recite several situations during my four years at BA that have stood out in this regard, many of which I have written about in other places. A few years ago, our Boys Soccer team chose to forfeit a critical soccer game because they believed the referee had awarded them a goal that was undeserved. Last year, I watched our golf captain grit his teeth and accept a truly unmerited, or at least unsportsmanlike, penalty for grounding his club in a hazard. He had tripped on a rocky crag on his way to find his ball, and the club he was carrying had touched the grass inadvertently. Just this year, our girls cross country captain forfeited a race she ran as soon as she realized that she had made a wrong turn out on the course. When one considers the typical stories that are routinely covered by the media regarding sportsmanship, I believe these annual examples truly say something special about Berwick. While I am committed to making sure that athletics is always placed in proper balance with our other programs, I am also unapologetic for its critical role in fulfilling our mission. Certainly in my own life, I learned many hard lessons on the athletic fields. Chief among them may have been some version of “Hard work does not guarantee success, but without hard work there is no chance for success.” The obvious message in that statement about “practice makes perfect” is fairly obvious to us all, but the acknowledgment that there would be moments when one works harder than others and still finds less success has been a more important pill for me to swallow. Athletics is an area where we are all aware of the confluence of practice, talent, and even luck. This blend is neither predictable nor always fair at first glance. When considering the overall mission of the school, another reason I cherish athletics is the public nature of its assessment. Very similar in this way are music and drama , which I wrote about extensively in our last BA Today issue. There is nowhere for students or coaches to hide while out on those fields as there is an audience who is often all too ready to judge the nuances of the performance. Teachers and students in the academic classroom rarely get forced into this sort of arena, where the quality of the enterprise is put on display for everyone to