We Are National Champions!

That is right. One of our "teammates" just won the Women's College Basketball National Championship. See here. And if your teammate wins a national championship that means you have won a national championship, right? I thought so.

At first, when I set an organization goal of having one player from each of the top college sports championship teams join the corps, there was a lot of resistance. People wondered aloud whether there was a correlation between being physically gifted at a sport and of course spending your entire life training for that one sport and teaching in an under-resourced classroom. Is there any correlation between a leader who has never taught and organization that recruits new teachers? Does correlation even correlate to success? It is times like these -- when I hear fallacious arguments -- that I am glad I took those philosophy classes at Princeton.

Anyway, back to my championship. Most people have congratulated me for netting such a high performer. But, truth be told, the whole thing is kind of a failed mission by our Admissions department. See, Nicky did pretty good on the rubric, but the whole point of accepting her was to get her to convince Candace Parker to join the corps. We dropped a lot of hints, like starting out her phone interivew with, "Hi, may I speak with the person who is going to convince Candace Parker to joint Teach For America," and we also had our in-person interviewer just call her "Candace" throughout the entire interview. Sounds sleazy, I know, but come-on, Candace-freakin-Parker! She's 6 foot 4 and has a 28 inch vertical leap. With that kind of physical presence she could have taught high school algebra through interpretative dance! The kids would have loved it.

Supposedly we lost out to the WNBA, or as we spell it here in TFA headquarters - WTF? The new collective bargaining agreement just signed by the owners allows for your own hotel room after you've played in the league for five years! Again, WTF? Trust me, we would have hooked C-Park up with a single at institute. No problem.

Anyway, I've got some management consultants from Bain building a display case for my NCAA trophy. I'm going to ask Nicky to send her piece of the net to me and showcase it here for a few weeks and then let it tour the regions. We'll have a ceremony with a video montage of her season in place of one of those boring regional learning team meetings that all of our corps members have to go to.

I like it when we show other corps members what it means to be a superstar. It's motivating.