Here’s an excerpt of my email:

Hi. My son pole vaulted in high school and he has personal best of 13′. He is an incoming sophomore and was hesitant to join the track team as a freshman because of your standards which I believe is 14′. Is it a policy that you don’t consider an athlete if he doesn’t meet your standards? If it is true I find this disturbing because you are denying your students equal opportunity to be great athletes. My older son vaults for TCNJ and his personal best in high school is only 13’6″. He recently broke his school record of 15’4″ and he’s only a sophomore. If he went to Rutgers he wouldn’t have made the standards and his talents would have all been wasted. I would like my younger son to get the same opportunity as he did at Rutgers. He loves and misses pole vaulting a lot. Please let me know if you would consider him. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely
Armando Alorro

Here’s the reply:

Hello,
Thank you for your note. A few years ago the university athletic department imposed squad limits on our team. Because of this, we have had to lower the number of people on our team. The people we are looking at and competing on the team are the guys who can help us on the Big East championship level. In the pole vault it, usually, takes jumps from 15′ to 17 + feet to score in the meet. In all of the events, having those squad limits has forced us to be strict with our rosters. In fact, so we did not go over these limits, we have not had tryouts for the team in the last few years. Unfortunately, with these limits, we would not be able to help your son, or other athletes in the same position, be part of the team and compete in the meets. I realize your son is a sophomore, but, we have encouraged other athletes in the same situation as your son, to look into other schools where they would be given the chance to compete on the team at that school. Those athletes were coming out of high school.
I appreciate your note. I hope my reply further explains our situation and I sincerely wish your son the best with school. Thank you very much.
Coach Mike Mulqueen

I call it bullcrap! How could they possibly do that?  Other Div I schools have better programs than Rutgers but they don’t limit student-athlete participation. I’ve seen vaulters from Bucknell, Penn State, UConn, etc who can’t even vault 13 ft. and these programs are way better than Rutgers.

What makes Rutgers think they are special?

But of all the sports that I have mentioned, there is one that truly stands out in giving my three sons important lessons in life – wrestling. I’ve never wrestled in my life but have watched my sons get slammed and beat up every practice, struggle with their weights, starve themselves just to make weight for months on end, get bloodied after a match, endure pain in different parts of their bodies, and still end up loving the sport so much that they strive very hard just to earn a metal around their necks. There must be someting in the sport that makes it tick.

In my opinion, it is one of the hardest and the toughest high school sport around – if not the hardest and the toughest. It is not for everyone. Anybody can wrestle, don’t get me wrong. But to be able to endure and stay with the sport for a long time, one must be able and willing to take all the physical and mental punishments associated with the sport. Only the toughest remain. The conditioning level, physical and mental demand of practice that each wrestler go through 5-6 days a week is nothing to be sneered at. Wrestlers must possess a lot of discipline in regards to food intake to be able to maintain their weight throughout the season, dieting to near starvation. Unlike football players and swimmers who must consume lots and lots of carbohydrates to maintain their strength and endurance, wrestlers must make do with the minimum carb and protein intake just to get by their practices and matches, lest they run the risk of bumping up a weight class or losing their slot on the team.

Wrestling is the purest form of combat sport with only the bare hands and legs as your weapon, not to mention the oldest sport known to man. Wrestlers are the most dedicated athletes around. They have no team to work with them to pin an opponent, no one to fall back on when they make a mistake and have themselves only to blame if they lose. They have the leanest, meanest and strongest physique among their peers. They never back down or avoid any match or competition, afterall, that’s what they look forward to after all the blood, sweat and tears that flowed on the mat. There are no timeouts, no substitution, no place to hide and no way to escape in a wrestling match.

As the saying goes – once you have wrestled,  everything else in life is easy.

The App Store made available hundreds of new applications, 20% of which are free, with thousands more in the pipeline. I installed a couple of the free apps and found some interesting. I was particularly fond of Phanfare’s ability to upload the just-taken pictures to your Phanfare account in real time so you don’t have to store the pictures locally. This is particularly useful when on vacation and have your friends and family see your photos as they happen.

Jott is another nice utility that you can actually use while on the go. The iPhone becomes a transcriber where it turns your voice into text and stores them in your Jott account for later retrieval. Not only does it work like a notepad on steroids. You can also call Jott’s 800 number to compose and send emails and text messages using only your voice, add appointments to your calendar, shop at Amazon, etc. Now that’s nifty.

I also like VSnax, a free mobile video service that offers news, sports highlights, gossip, short film, etc. Currently, the service has CBS, Spike, VH1, G4, and The Style networks. You need to be on a wi-fi network, however, to get the best results. I tried it with Edge network and it was very frustrating to say the least. Sling Media will be coming out with their version for the iPhone and I can’t wait to watch my favorite shows streaming from my slingbox at home.

Then there are search apps for virtually anything, such as events, movies, people, restaurants, etc. The beauty of these search engines is that they are specialty search engines so you don’t get irrelavant results. One particular search app that I like is Yelp which searches for restaurants, bars, banks, service stations and drugstores in your current location. Click on the address and you will be brought to Google maps complete with directions. Click on the telephone number and iPhone will automatically dial the listed number.

You see, I’m not a big fan of Apple. I am a PC kind of guy and iPods are the farthest thing from my mind. I said to myself – what the heck. Let me try the iPod feature. So I started uploading music to my iPhone and what a better way to test drive it than running on my threadmill while listening to it. Afterall, I needed to get back to my exercise routine which I haven’t done in more than a millenium.

Not bad. It sounded better than the Zen V Plus from Creative Labs I bought from Buy.com a year before. I kept toggling between iPod and YouTube and before I knew it, I had jogged 3 miles in 45 minutes! Wow, this is great! I can watch my favorite YouTube clips, listen to my music, check my emails and get healthy at the same time. Not a bad deal at all!

Twenty-five pounds and 4-inches-off-my-waistline later, I am still doing the same stuff without any let up, only this time in a real gym at Bally Fitness. I added more songs to my music collection and added weight training to my exercise routine. I am more fit and muscular now than I was 20 years ago, all in a matter of five months and I feel I can run a half marathon. Only caveat is I had to spend a couple of hundred dollars for new pairs of pants and workout clothes.

Next stop – the New York City Marathon.

I coughed up about $40 plus shipping for an LG HBS200 stereo headset three weeks ago only to find out that it only works making and receiving calls.  So much for the stereophonic portion of it. Dang! The iPod and YouTube functionalities of the phone will not stream sound to the device.

Pairing the headset and the iPhone was a breeze and I thought I was on my way to a wire-free listening experience while running on my threadmill. Afterall, I’ve managed to yank my iPhone a couple of times off the front panel of the threadmill where it is sitting  because of the dangling wire in the way of my swinging arms, and I thought a wireless device was worth the investment.

I spent hours and hours pouring over the manual and scouring the internet for a solution. And I found this: IT DOESN’T WORK.

The bottomline is that in respect to Bluetooth technology Apple probably made the decision to make the iPhone just that: a phone. Or maybe they want to capture the market by making sure no other Bluetooth devices will work fully on their phones except their own hardware. 

A typical Apple business paradigm.

That’s why I never liked Apple products. But, hey, who am I kidding? The iPhone is the best damned cellphone I ever had. And now I can make phone calls in stereo.

I have followed and watched their every match since they first started six years ago, and every time my stomach turned and twitched uncontrollably. It is as if I was the one wrestling.  No wrestling dad ever want to see his child getting hurt or injured, and you got to take it one match at a time. They love it and keeps them away from trouble.

My oldest son, a junior and in the 130-pound weight class, has a career record of 72-32 so far and at pace to break the school record of 101 wins by his senior year. My middle son, a sophomore who wrestled 119 pounds, is not in a hurry and has a career record of 31-14 by the end of the season.

Next year, all three of them will be in  the same HS varsity team, barring any injuries and will spearhead a very strong Group 1 (small school) squad.

Nothing is more fulfilling for a father to see all his three boys in the same varsity team in the same year.

That’s the problem. I can’t get enough of golf even after spending two weeks in the Philippines, trying to cram business and golf in one fell swoop. Probably not a good idea since golf balls usually don’t taste nearly as good as meatballs in a luncheon meeting.

But seriously, I try to get as many rounds as I can during the golf season to the chagrin of my wife, whose patience stretches back seventeen years and six kids since I first handled a golf club. It’s been chaos ever since. Tried to shake off the habit a dozen times but for some odd reasons, my golf bag and shoes always end up in the trunk of my car, as if telling me “hey buddy! You’re not looking so good today. How about a nice walk and while you’re at it, hit a few balls down at Rockleigh.”

 So here I am, still looking for that best A game of my life.