The Gift from Purple Shorts

In a very significant way you need to be a part of it to truly appreciate it, but it is so powerful and amazing that I will try my best to convey some of the craft to you. For those of you who have followed Lucky Mallonee’s soccer coaching career, you know the program has enjoyed seasons full of wins and sometimes titles as well as other campaigns that included losing records. There are certain constants, however, that permeate through all of his teams regardless of wins and losses.

My perspective is as a player in the mid-eighties, and primarily as an assistant coach on his staff from the fall of ’94 through the present. For the last nine years, what soccer historians will someday come to call ‘the Ryugo Era’ we’ve been extremely competitive. We’ve enjoyed a few regular season titles, lots of play-off games, and one championship game appearance. In some ways it was harder to see Lucky’s genius with these teams because we enjoyed an abundance of talent. That is not to say that Lucky did not mold it and wring out the best of it, because he did. Let’s just say it took a discerning eye to see it.

The gift I’m alluding to is the uncanny knack to get these kids to see beyond their own self-defined potential and then to reach it. As long as I’ve been a part of his teams, and I experienced this very directly as one of his players, his intuition for an individual’s true strengths and weaknesses is most perceptive. As only a true progressive teacher can, Lucky sets about leading these individuals to maximize their strengths, and then, what’s most incredible, he leads them to identify their weaknesses and master them.

On the soccer field, you can see this process at work with this year’s squad. We do not have an overabundance of soccer talent, but the goal tending from Jake Abrams ’12 has been spectacular, and the outstanding play of striker Andrew Patterson ’11 has been integral to the team’s success thus far. This season Lucky has taken a group of athletes who got humiliated in a scrimmage at the hands of an A-Conference opponent four weeks ago and melded them into a team that is now battling the best of our B-Conference rivals to a virtual standstill.

If you’re still reading this and saying to yourself ‘that’s all well and good’ but at the end of the day who really cares about high school soccer?’ then here’s the point. After living through this experience and receiving the gift of Lucky’s coaching, these kids go out into the ‘real world’ and apply the lessons learned. The results are a steady stream of emails, letters, and calls from high-achieving professionals in all walks of life, including Hollywood executives, college professors, attorneys, financial magnates, and doctors, all saying that they got to where they are in life by applying themselves the way Mr. Mal taught them.

At Park, we have lots of meetings, and we talk about many areas of the Park experience. Sometimes we talk about athletics, and we wrestle with questions like, ‘how can we express to the ‘outside world’ how special Park athletics truly are?’ Oh, and of course, everyone wants that accomplished with a tag line to match our society’s diminished attention span. Well, here’s one about the old man in purple shorts who roams Kelly Field in the fall, “He doesn’t just win games, he changes lives.”

High Tide

If you were driving around town on Labor Day weekend you probably saw firefighters’ raising funds for the fight against muscular dystrophy through their boot campaign. I love the boot campaign and happily gave. As I dropped my bills into the boot, and received a very warm smile and thank you, I had a flashback of the aftermath of 9/11. There seemed to be a period of months after the tragedy, maybe through the end of the year, when all Americans seemed to go out of their way to help one and other. You noticed it at the most mundane times--while driving, passing through doorways, and other times when we tend to ignore others. We suddenly became a more empathetic nation.

We, as a nation, and on a smaller scale as a Park community, are constantly looking for opportunities to help. Our reasons are myriad, but there is no denying we are a better country or community for it, and moreover it creates a near palpable sensation of good feeling.

Let me say, I don’t intend for these posts to always focus on giving. (By the way the Boys’ Varsity Soccer Team, on which I serve as Lucky’s assistant coach, has home games this week on Tuesday and Thursday at 4:00, and we’d love your support.) But back to the good feelings. At Park, we do a lot of helping. The Parents’ Association has raised funds for a number of causes, including multi-year support for the Susan Komen Race for the Cure and for Haitian relief. Then, of course, there is the fundraising for Park, or more specifically for the students and faculty at Park. All of these efforts bring out what I believe is our natural desire to support important needs. The result is that there is a lot of good feeling around here.

What can I say? I think giving is a good thing. Someone an awful lot smarter than me said, “A rising tide raises all ships,” and ‘Bama football fans far more devoted than me have spent countless hours chanting, “Roll Tide Roll.” I agree with both sentiments.

Who Rocks

By Roger Seidenman, Director of Development


My favorite moment as a blogger came two years ago when I was writing about the virtues of a Park education and ended the piece with a quote from The Who. Stupidly, I asked a friend who had read the post what she thought of it. She admitted sheepishly, “I liked the last line.” So in that spirit I thought I would bring back some of Pete Townshend’s wisdom regarding our new Annual Fund.


“I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution


Take a bow for the new revolution


Smile and grin at the change all around.”


Last year we completely overhauled how we run the Annual Fund. We switched to a model that allowed our devoted volunteers to discuss giving with their prospects on their own schedules rather than responding to a school-scheduled series of phoning nights. Ultimately the results were good. Our unrestricted giving went up more than 6% in a year that still included a challenging national and global economy.


Another benefit to the new system was how many more first-time solicitors joined in the effort. Many of these new volunteers expressed how energizing it was to help the school in this endeavor.


It is now a new year, and we have many of our volunteers returning, and as always we are looking for new voices to help. One way to start is to join us at this year’s Annual Fund kick-off breakfast on Tuesday, September 21 beginning at 7:45am for faculty and staff and at 8:30am for the rest of the Park community in the Lieberman Building. If you can’t make it, and want to volunteer for the Annual Fund, feel free to reply to me at rseidenman@parkschool.net or Becky Bridger, Annual Fund Coordinator, at rbridger@parkschool.net.


So after a long, hot summer of thinking about the Annual Fund, here’s my current view on how great the Annual Fund is and the role that it plays in Park’s financial picture.


The Annual Fund:
1.) Makes it possible for students and families who would not otherwise be able to attend Park to do so;
2.) Supports faculty salaries (though there will never be enough to compensate them for their intellect and dedication).
3.) Unites us in supporting an institution that we all love.


Thanks for all of your support. We’re looking forward to another terrific year.