Recently the Horizon Central Athletic Association handed out recognition awards to a number of individuals from around the area for their tremendous work over the last number of years with the athletics programs at their schools.
This was really nice to see.
Teachers and community coaches put in an incredible amount of effort into making school athletics not only a success but also fun.
Oftentimes these actions go unnoticed or underappreciated.
I can admit as a younger student in school I often overlooked the effort the teachers were putting in to make sure we could play sports at school.
As I got older it got easier and easier to see their efforts, especially after going through a number of times where we were not allowed to have school sports because the teachers were on work-to-rule strike and were not allowed to coach our school sports teams.
This left me unfulfilled a lot of times as I always enjoyed playing on school sports teams.
These teachers, on top of working every day Monday-Friday also have to find time to do homework at night, marking tests, and various other papers, but they also take a couple hours out of their days and oftentimes their weekends to give the students a chance to play sports.
This takes a tremendous amount of dedication to the students.
And not only are they doing this once, but a great deal of the teachers are coaching two, three, or sometimes even four or more sports every single year.
As an athlete or parent think about the number of times you or your child has competed in a sport.
And how many of those times has the same teacher been the coach?
It is incredible the number of hours these teachers must be putting in.
And it is not just sports teams, it is student council, clubs, choirs and band, everything outside of the normal classroom.
We are lucky that we live in a society where teachers willingly take on responsibility outside of their classrooms.
But we should not take it for granted.
The next time you are on a sports team, or in a band, or club, or anything else you do outside of the classroom or you have to drop your child off or pick them up from any of those make sure to thank the teacher.
They sure do deserve it.
