Boy Scouts offers skills for life
Tim CreamerAs Scoutmaster of Troop 152, I was talking to one of the dads of one of our young scouts and asked if he was going to be at the first scout meeting for our troop on Sept 10. He mentioned to me that he and his wife had chatted and decided that their son was overcommitted. He was disappointed to communicate to me that probably Scouts would be a casualty of an over-filled schedule.
When I inquired as to what had pre-empted Scouts, he said his son was playing on a travel soccer team. I have spent long hours on the sidelines of soccer and baseball fields, and on the sidelines of basketball courts in the winter instructing youth on the importance on keeping your head up, keeping your glove down, and dribbling with your left hand. But it always surprises me when people allow Scouts to be a casualty of our sports-focused society. The value of team sports is also not lost on me: The camaraderie I had with my friends on my high school soccer team lasts to this day.
But we live in an environment of value. We look for things of value. We look for things that will last, where we “get our money’s worth.” Scouts is an over-looked value.
Last year an article in Newsweek, in their college search issue, described a conversation with a college admission’s committee member. The question was posed that how, with more then 13,000 applications, they sorted the applications. He stated that they divided them into three piles: the automatic no’s, the maybes and the automatic yes’s. The automatic yes’s for review included “Valedictorians, Salutatorians, Eagle Scouts, people who had started their own companies or invented something while in high school, etc.”
It was intriguing to me because my son as an Eagle Scout was accepted at all five of the colleges to which he applied. One sent a letter back in two weeks with information concerning available scholarship monies from the university.
Would he have gotten these letters had he not been an Eagle Scout? I don’t know, but with an otherwise average resume, B+ grades, an SAT score in the 80th percentile, I would not think so.
Any good travel team practices twice a week for an hour and a half without including travel time. Then weekends are spent traveling and playing in leagues, indoor or outdoor. The commitment would be a minimum of six hours a week up to 12 to 16 hours – depending on travel, games, tournaments, etc.
Scouts is an hour and a half, three to four times a month with the opportunity to travel and see places like Independence Hall, Old North Church, the Basketball Hall of Fame and the Pentagon
.
Scouts teaches life skills. It teaches one how to respond in emergencies. It teaches first aid. Recently there have been many emergencies in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita down south and the tragedy involving the students at Virginia Tech. In both of these instances, scouts assisted in relief efforts and afforded comfort and care to themselves and others injured in the shootings.
Scouts teaches leadership. One of the key tenets of Scouts is teaching young boys to turn into young men to turn into young leaders. Our country is desperately in need of leadership as evidenced by some of the response to the recent natural disasters. Boy Scouts affords the opportunity for young men to be placed in leadership positions that get them the footing for leading larger groups as they get older.
So, as you sit with your fall schedule and sit with your young son, consider Boy Scouts. Consider leadership of tomorrow. Consider the value of time spent.
He could write on his resume that he was goalie or point guard for his eighth grade travel team. Or he could write on his resume that he was a Star Scout, Life Scout, and even possibly Eagle Scout. The value is incomparable.
Manlius resident Timothy M. Creamer M.D. is Scoutmaster of Troop 152 and an internist at University Hospital in Syracuse. He currently coaches softball in the Fayetteville-Manlius Recreation League