Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Self-awareness goes a long way

Last week, I watched a great high school football playoff game.

My son’s team went toe-to-toe with an undefeated squad from Atlanta loaded with stud athletes headed to places like Ole Miss.

Late in the game, his team put together a long drive and scored a touchdown. The crowd, which had traveled from Columbus in cars and spirit buses, went nuts. The band rocked, the cheerleaders jumped up and down, and the student section hummed the rift from “Seven Nation Army.”

It was beautiful.

At least, that’s how I remember it.

This week, I tried to explain the scene to a friend of mine, and he cut me off. “You’ve been a Vanderbilt fan for too long,” he said.

That’s because we’d lost the game 48-7. On the scoreboard, we were huge losers.

But four years ago, that would have been the score in the first quarter, and we’d have started the second half with a running clock. 

This year, we won an astounding seven games and beat two area powerhouses that had crushed us last season. We advanced to something called a mini-game, during which we played two different teams in 20 minutes, beat one of them, and went to the playoffs.

It was one of those seasons where every week the team achieved a feat it hadn’t accomplished since the Eisenhower administration.

Last week, when my wife asked me where we would play the following week if we won, I laughed. When the dream did end last week in Stockbridge, I was ready. You know, because I’m a Vanderbilt fan. I knew I was living a dream, and that the dream was going to end.

It was hard for some parents to take. Several of them blamed our loss on the fact that we played the regular season in a weak region and didn’t face tougher competition.

Um, if we’d played tougher competition during the regular season, we wouldn’t have made the playoffs.

A little self-awareness goes a long way.

Take this week, for example. The Muscogee County School District got its scores on the new Georgia Milestones test and was below state average in all subjects.

This is similar to what happened with our AYP scores in 2011 when expectations were dramatically raised by No Child Left Behind. Superintendent Susan Andrews seemed stunned by the results, which put us near the bottom of the state, behind even Bibb County. She also seemed surprised by the disparity between scores in north Columbus and south Columbus.

Her replacement, David Lewis, came to town talking about Macon Road — even calling it “the Macon-Dixon Line” — and started putting together a 10-year plan.

Weeks ago, he was talking about how far our local test scores were going to drop with the new standards, and how he planned to rally the community around the challenge of improving an urban district with a vast majority of students living in poverty.

When the scores were finally announced, we were at least ahead of Bibb County and our other fellow second-tier cities, including Chatham and Richmond counties.

But nobody’s declaring victory just yet.

This time around, we know what we’re up against, and that we’ve got a battle ahead of us.

Dimon Kendrick-Holmes, executive editor, dkholmes@ledger-enquirer.com.

This story was originally published November 20, 2015 at 11:38 PM with the headline "Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Self-awareness goes a long way."