During my 25-year career as a boy’s head basketball coach, I found the most satisfying (and most important) part of coaching was planning and devising game plans. 

Putting my knowledge and experience to test to give my teams the best chance of winning was challenging and time consuming, but also enjoyable and exciting. Equally enjoyable and exciting was making adjustments to the game plan during the course of the game.

At times the game plan worked to perfection. Sometimes, the plan had to be adjusted immediately. With my better teams, the game plans varied …

The holiday season is rapidly approach­ing. The chang­ing colors of the leaves on trees remind us that we will soon be bom­barded with Black Friday advertise­ments. I was surprised during a recent visit to a depart­­ment store to find that Christmas decorations are already on the shelves.

It is so easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of this season and lose sight of the meaning of the first holiday of the season, Thanksgiving Day, which our Canadian neighbors already celebrated earlier this month. Having an attitude of …

Our local high school football coach asked me earlier this year to speak to the seniors on his team on a weekly basis. I have always enjoyed public speaking, so I jumped at the opportunity. Although I am finding plenty of meaningful activities to keep me busy since retiring nine months ago, speaking with the players is one of the most enjoyable things I do now.

My talks with the team members are not lengthy – perhaps five to ten minutes each time. For the content of my talks, I rely for …

It is interesting to note the clichés that have become common in our lexicon. Some of those clichés are useful for describing life with multiple myeloma. However, there are clichés that, because I have multiple myeloma, I am not so fond of.

My favorite cliché, which appeared about five years ago, is "It is what it is." A colleague of mine, who heard me use the saying frequently, gave me a plaque with the phrase engraved on it. I kept the plaque on my desk. It helped remind me that in my job …

Despite my love for sports and the fact that I have been directly involved in sports in one form or another for most of my life, I have found that there are not many sports movies worth watching. Few, if any, have realistic sports action scenes, and it is obvious that the writers and producers know very little about sports or, giving them the benefit of the doubt, it is just too difficult to create sports action that resembles what we see in live sporting events.

While the action in none of the …

Since retiring from my job as a school superintendent nearly six months ago, I have made a concerted effort to not allow what time I have left in life to be pre­occupied with the fact that I have multiple myeloma. In other words, I try not be defined by the disease.

Little did I realize how difficult that would be.

Because my life would be less structured with much more free time during retirement, I was concerned that the challenges of living with multiple myeloma would dominate my thinking even more than …

It is easy to become self-centered when diagnosed with a serious illness like cancer. That self-centeredness becomes even more intense when the cancer is considered incurable, as is the case with multiple myeloma.

It's easy to give someone a pass in such a situation because it is com­pletely understandable how, when confronted with their own mortality, they would tend to look at things differently.

As I reflect on the four years that I have lived with multiple myeloma, I realize that my concentration on learning about the disease, dealing with the …