Bounce-back Ability

Assembly Talk by CW Swan, 6 November 2006

The Headmaster has asked me to talk to you this morning about bounce back ability.  What does it mean?  Well I presume the thing that gave him this idea were the injuries to Peter, Finlay, Ralph, Alistair E, Oliver H, Douglas V, Toby S, and now Ali R.  All eight of them have sustained injuries that prevent them playing sport for a long period of time.

Bounce back ability.  What do you think it means?
I have 2 basketballs here; let’s see how they bounce back.

One flat – nothing is happening, nothing in it, it’s empty.
The second – something is happening, there is a reaction!!

We all get knocks in life and many of them can be good because if we respond in the right way they will help us to develop character.

When I was at school, in my last year I had problems similar to these eight boys I have mentioned.  Playing for the 1st XV at the start of term, I tore a cartilage in my left knee.  With no keyhole surgery in those days, it was a bit of a butcher’s job and they had to remove the whole cartilage.  It took me until December to be ready to play again. Fit and raring to go, I broke my finger in training just before the last game of the term against Watson’s, which would have been my first game back.  So I was ruled out from playing for another three weeks.  If we fast forward to the Summer Term, playing cricket for the 1st XI, I was on 97 not out against a local school, and in turning for a third run tore the cartilage in my right knee.  I was carried off, carted off to hospital and out for the whole term, just getting back to play in the cricket tour at the end of term.

So how do we get over problems and difficulties, and bounce back?

Well, for me I think it was just sheer determination that I wasn’t going to be beaten by it; I wanted to be a winner; doggedness, if you like, to come out on top. It wasn’t easy but one just had to get on with it.  It was no good being sentimental, pathetic or whining, as we all can – I just had to concentrate on the exercises I needed to do to get my limbs strong again.

Every single person in this Memorial Hall will have to overcome something almost daily.  In education, everything is built upon difficulty – there is always something to overcome.

We need to have ambition, which is a mixture of pugnacity – the inclination to fight and pride. It’s the attitude that we are not going to be beaten by any problem.  The natural reaction in us should be to fight the problem and not give in until it has been defeated.  But we have to exercise it and use it – we have a choice – do you listen to your weak voice or do you listen to your strong voice?  It’s having a positive attitude that counts where we don’t focus on the negative but always the positive and learn quickly from our mistakes.

The strong voice says, ‘it can be done and it will be done!’  So we need to be tough on ourselves, not giving in to laziness, meeting these deadlines for work, getting the prep done on time and not half baked.

It’s ‘get up and get going‘ – you making something happen.  The Australian cricket team, one of the great teams in sport in our generation, has a motto: for all their brilliance, they are ‘never satisfied’; that’s their motto, never satisfied, always striving to improve, get better, and learn.

So which of these two basketballs are you going to be: the deflated one with no energy or the one that fights the difficulty and never ever, ever, ever, ever, gives in?