Consider sports and the performing arts.  Both require high levels of physicality or athleticism.  A baseball player has less than a second to swing at a ball travelling 85+ miles per hour and make contact.  A pianist executing Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu must be able to play 19 notes per second, which requires over 350 distinct motor actions every second in the pianist’s fingers alone. 

The ballet dancer must be able to transfer all of her weight from the toes of one foot to another making the transition appear completely natural.  Some athletic endeavors might even very well be considered performing arts, e.g., figure skating and gymnastics floor exercise.    In each of these cases, whether it is an artistic performance or an athletic one, speed, agility, stamina, endurance, eye-hand coordination, complex muscle coordination, timing, touch, and dexterity are required. 

I confess I’m not a big Yankees fan, but who could ignore the countdown of Derek Jeter’s final games as he closed the books on a brilliant baseball career? As part of the celebration, Bernie Williams, one of his good friends and former teammates, performed his own solo guitar version of Take Me Out to the Ball Game during the 7^th inning stretch of Jeter’s final game.     Williams, who played his entire 16-year career with the New York Yankees was a four-time Golden Glove Award centerfielder and a five-time MLB All-Star.  What brought this celebrated athlete to Yankee Stadium to perform baseball’s classic hymn?  Williams is as gifted with a guitar as he is with a bat and glove.  A classically trained guitarist, he has released two jazz albums since retiring from baseball, one nominated for a Latin Grammy.  Coincidence?  Not really.  In Rhythms of the Game: The Link Between Musical and Athletic Performance, Williams writes: 

I’ve often been asked how baseball has influenced my life in music.  I think it was actually the other way around: music influenced how I play baseball.  The game, after all, is entirely built on rhythm, an essential element of music.  Great players have an intuitive sense of rhythm, the effect of which is great timing.  Every at bat and every play has its own rhythm to it, and music is the undercurrent.  From Miles Davies one can learn that, no matter what selection of notes you have to play, they don’t mean a thing if they’re not played in precisely the right space, time, and with the appropriate level of nuance.  The same is true of baseball.

Ask any football historian (or Pittsburgh Steelers fan) for a short list of greatest performances and Lynn Swann’s four receptions for 161 yards and one touchdown in Super Bowl X would invariably make the list. But it isn’t Swann’s yardage and touchdown that fans remember that day as much as his three extraordinary catches described by one veteran reporter as the "break-out-the-thesaurus variety."  Even before Swann retired from football, his athleticism and ability to make seemingly impossible catches was legendary.  To what does the football Hall of Famer attribute a significant part of his success?  At his mother’s insistence, Swann began taking dance at four years of age and continued his study through his senior year of high school.  He has often credited his years of ballet, tap, and jazz as playing a significant role in developing those skills that made him such a great football player, i.e., body awareness and control, balance, timing, and a sense of rhythm.

Ask any artist what it takes to perfect one’s talent, and he or she will invariable reply, “resilience and determination.”  Ask an athlete the same question, and you’ll likely hear a similar response.  Developing one’s artistic or athletic talents requires thousands and thousands of hours of practice.  Even the most kinesthetically intelligent or aesthetically gifted students will invest countless hours developing their natural talents before they will be the best that they can be. 

Determination must be supplemented with a healthy dose of resilience.  The list of individuals blessed with artistic or athletic talent who never reach their potential is a long one.  Visualize a painting with ideal balance of color and composition or a three-point shot with the perfect thrust and arc.  Imagine just the right amount of wrist pressure and arm movement needed to create a 32^nd note on the violin or a figure skater challenging the limits of the human body to pull off a triple axel.  Mastering these very difficult artistic and athletic endeavors comes at a price, i.e., failure.  Samuel Beckett perhaps said it best, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”  Failure’s life lesson? Resilience.  The athlete or artist will fail many, many times before mastery occurs.  This idea of resilience is so important to success and a life well-lived that it is one of the qualities in Miami Country Day’s Portrait of a Graduate.  

Ultimately the strong connections between the arts and athletics should not surprise us that much.  The heart of our mission at Miami Country Day School is the education of the whole child.  We think in terms of the intellectual, physical, aesthetic, social, emotional, and spiritual potentials of each student.  None of these six potentials truly develop in isolation of one another.  When we focus on one of these potentials, invariably other potentials are pulled into the circle as well.   We all know Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as one of the basketball greats.  He is also a celebrated author and cultural historian.  A serious student and fan of jazz, Jabbar once observed, “Music is really something that makes people whole.”  His insight around music could easily be expanded to include all of the visual and performing arts.  The arts, like athletics, do indeed help make us whole, which is why they both continue to be critical to Country Day’s mission of educating the whole child.