Back to the start. Week 1.

Going back to the beginning of the unit and starting with a tutorial before a lecture is always interesting. Not quite knowing what to expect from the lecturer or fellow students makes this a particularly fun scenario.
Even better it gets relocated to the gym and we play a sport that requires a ridiculous amount of skill; basketball.
I'm an avid fan of the game, but dribbling, passing and shooting can not be acquired from watching the likes of LeBron, Kobe and CP3 nor playing NBA2K13... But I, along with just about everyone else bar the incredibly gifted and those that actually play the sport plodded along with the game and I must say I did enjoy playing, it beats sitting down for an hour and a half!
Keith's interjections did not make being bad at basketball any more enjoyable, but it was lighthearted and if you can't laugh at yourself what's the point?

Moving on to the lecture, it was merely a brief introduction to what the unit will contain, but in addition to this Keith touched on a few current topics, most notably the subject of cheating in sport; the Lance Armstrong case and the drugs in the AFL and NRL respectively, more-so the role that coaches had in the handling of these particular situations, allowing it to continue or even orchestrating the rouse... It brought up a notion that Keith called 'dis-play', which I thought to be quite clever, and at the same time made me think of other situations where coaches had tried to bend the rules or simply flat out disregard them in order to obtain a competitive edge. Many instances in NCAA football came to mind (SMU 'Death Penalty', sanctions against USC and Reggie Bush losing his Heisman and recently the Penn State scandal), the salary cap sorts by the Melbourne Storm and the BALCO scandal also. These all had measures of dis-play, in some instances no coach had any control over matters, but by overseeing something not right take place on their watch sees their name tarnished, and questions are always asked.

I'll have a look at week 2 in my next post and look forward to week 3.