“Norwich: One Tiny Vermont Town's Secret to Happiness and Excellence” by Karen Crouse
Published in 2018 by Simon & Schuster
Pages: 288
ISBN-10 : 1501119893
Date Finished: Jan 9, 2021
How strongly I recommend it: 5/10
Find it at Amazon or Bookshop.org
A former New York Times sports journalist takes a deep look at a small Vermont town and its counterintuitive ability to produce Olympians.
My Notes:
Yet despite its apparent ordinariness, Norwich is home to a probabilities puzzle for the statistics students at Dartmouth College, less than two miles away as the hermit thrush flies.
This town of roughly three thousand residents has accounted for three Olympic medals, and, since 1984, has put an athlete on every US Winter Olympics team except one.
The well water in Norwich is perfectly delicious, but the town's outsize success in Olympic sports has more to do with the way it collectively rears its children, helping them succeed without causing burnout or compromising their future happiness. It's how harried parents across America would like to bring up their children if not for the tiger moms and eagle dads in their midst.
Situated across the Connecticut River from Dartmouth College, Norwich used to be dismissed as a cow town by the people in Hanover, New Hampshire, where the university is located.
Niobe Way, a professor of applied psychology at New York University, told me that the social tapestry of Norwich represents a triumph of nurture over the natural order of the modern world, which has given us a wealth-and-acquisition model that favors autonomy over relationships and independence over community.
The Norwich athletes that I came to know seemed to have sidestepped the substance use, anxiety, and depression that often plague Olympians in retirement. Dr. Steven Ungerleider, a sports psychologist who has served in several capacities with the United States Olympic Committee, conducted a study, published in 1997, in which he interviewed fifty-seven retired United States Olympians in twelve sports. Forty percent of the group reported having serious post-Olympics problems. "Many reported that this was the only life they knew and it was inconceivable to do anything else," Ungerleider wrote.
Betsy retired from skiing shortly after the 1960 Olympics, and only then was she able to endorse and promote skiwear without fear of losing her amateur status. By the time Hannah arrived on the scene some forty years later, the model had changed. She was paid as a product endorser for clothing and ski equipment while she competed, but most of her sponsorships dried up after she retired.
Television turned out to be the Game changer. The exposure from global broadcasting partners attracted transnational corporate sponsors, which turned competitors into commodities and muddled the original message of the Olympics as a worldwide celebration of sport.
They were over the Olympics as must-see TV and were talking about the event as if it were a reality show they had once enjoyed immensely but now found fraudulent.
Norwich has a deep aversion to pushing its children too hard too soon. The public high school limits the number of Advanced Placement courses. And during one of my visits, the local paper, the Valley News, ran a front-page story in which teachers called for further reducing their high school students' stress, in part through independent study and special projects.
The billions of dollars spent to broadcast events like the Olympics has turned sports into big business. The rise of all-sports TV networks has created mass exposure where there once was little for events like the Little League World Series or high school football, causing the pro model to trickle down to youth sports. The stars of championships who used to draw scant public attention become overnight sensations, little pros in training.
Parents and coaches should strive to develop the next Jim Holland, younger brother of Mike and a two-time Olympic ski jumper who took the skills he honed in his sport—discipline, determination, perseverance, and goal setting—and applied them to starting a successful business. In 1996, he cofounded backcountry.com, a Utah-based online retailer that specializes in outdoor clothing and equipment.
But they were from Norwich, situated across the Connecticut River from Dartmouth College, which in 1928 hosted the first slalom race in the United States. It didn't matter how rich or poor you were; skiing was accessible to all children in the area through an innovative program called the Ford Sayre Memorial Ski School.
In the 1950s, skiing was sweeping the nation. The invention in 1934 of the rope tow and of the chairlift two years later helped the sport take off in remote American mining villages like Aspen, Colorado, and pristine mountain terrain like Sun Valley, Idaho, which soon became the first winter destination resort built in the United States. Both inventions made skiing less laborious, conserving the time and energy required to climb the side of a mountain before enjoying the exhilarating payoff of the descent.
Skiing was no longer the province of the wealthy few with the financial means to travel to the top resorts in Europe, and its growth attracted many of the best teachers from the continent. They came to the United States to spread their knowledge and passion in places like Dartmouth, where the shorthand for their instruction became a running joek: "Bend zee knees, two dollars, please." The 1940s and 1950s produced the first generation of US winter athletes, led by Andrea Mead Lawrence and Gretchen Fraser on the women's side and Billy Kidd on the men's, capable of competing against the best skiers from Europe.
And yet the beginning of the results-oriented culture that would eventually turn Olympic athletes into volatile commodities was there in the newspaper dispatch about Betsey and Penny.
After Pitou won her second silver, she returned to the Olympic Village with her head held high, only to be cornered by then Vice President Richard Nixon, who told her how sorry he was that she had lost. In the Valley News, a columnist writing under the name of Arthur Mountain wrote a piece implying that Betsy and Pitou had disappointed the country by failing to win gold.
The Norwich culture, with its organic cultivation of the whole person, promotes success in sports and life because one is never sacrificed for the other.
The Norwich jumpers could serve as a model for social science researchers, who have consistently found that positive relationships enhance not only performance but also physical and emotional well-being.
But in Norwich it wasn't at all a foreign concept. It was just what people did." Chris Hastings agreed. He never really thought about the Olympics—it was way down on his list of reasons for jumping.
"If you continue doing something you've done for such a long time, you can't really grow in other ways," Hannah said.
He descried the work as "the world's best job and the world's worst career" because of the low pay and long hours.
The town's ethos echoes the philosophy set forth in the late nineteenth century by the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics. In reviving the ancient Games in 1896, he said the most important thing was not winning but taking part, just as the essential thing in life was not conquering but fighting well. That sums up the approach in Norwich, where sports are a means of self-expression, a vehicle to sharpen one's life skills, and an integral part of a healthy routine.
She kept meticulous training logs, which showed that by the end of her career she had suited up 425 times and climbed 398,475 stairs in her ski boots in order to execute 6,325 jumps, honing her helicopter turns and backflips until these unnatural movements became second nature. [Hannah Kearney]
"No one said, 'Oh, we're so sorry,'" Hannah marveled. "I was nineteen years old and had gone to the Olympics. People acted like that was fantastic."
Beyond the town, her renown grew. She threw out the ceremonial first pitch at a Boston Red Sox game, but her gold medal did not set her up for life. For three years after her 2010 victory, Hannah made more than a quarter of a million dollars annually through her endorsements and performance bonuses. But as she prepared to defend her Olympic title in 2014, she noticed that the endorsement opportunities were drying up. Twelve events were added to the program for the Sochi Olympics, and the pond of athletes available to companies fishing for brand ambassadors had become overstocked.
"Norwich finds the right balance of raising you to have high expectations for your life and for your future, but not expecting, demanding, a specific kind of success," she said.
One of the United States' leading experts on youth sports injuries, Dr. Neeru Jayanthi, conducted a three-year study that found that kids whose devotion to a single sport adds up to more hours a week than their ages had a 36 percent increased risk of experiencing serious overuse injuries.
Eugene reminded Andrew of Norwich, except in Oregon it was a freak weather event when they had to shovel snow from the trails to run. [no one shovels trails to run, maybe she meant the track?]
Andrew's success was so improbable that a rival coach sidled up to Lananna and joked that the scarecrow-thin Andrew must be tested at once for performance-enhancing drugs. Lananna laughed and said that Andrew wouldn't know "a steroid from a hemorrhoid."
By the time Andrew graduated from Oregon in 2010 with a degree in sociology, he could make a comfortable living on the track. ... He met with representatives from New Balance and Nike. Andrew liked both brands. Nike was the company that his mentor, Jeff Johnson, had helped build, but he felt an instant connection with the representatives from New Balance, headquartered in Boston, a two-hour drive from Norwich. They seemed to grasp that he ran for the joy of it, not the fortune to be made. "The well-being of their athletes comes first, not their performance," Andrew remembered. [he signed with Nike anyway].
"I've tried, but I don't have the arrogance, the macho-man mentality, to do that," ... He could not relate to his training teammate Nick Symmonds, the 800 runner who beat Andrew at the 2008 Olympic trials and years later would describe running as a business and "a great way for me to market my products."
At the time it was drawn up, Andrew's upside was high. He was expected to compete internationally and grace medals podiums and maybe set records. Six years later, the reality is that he is not qualifying for the bonuses. "I'm not making the teams and I haven't won any medals, so naturally they're cutting me down further and further." he said. Andrew had given his life over to track, and where had it gotten him? He realized he was better off when his life had more balance.
They intuitively sensed what a 2013 study in the Journal of Child and Family Studies showed: that overprotective or helicopter parents thwart a child's basic psychological need for autonomy and competence, resulting in an uptick in depression and lower life-satisfaction levels.
Niobe Way, an NYU professor and author of the 2011 book Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, considers the teenage years all too often a transition into isolation. As boys prepare to strike out on their own, they are steered away from relationships toward achievement. ... In 2008, researchers at the University of Virginia gathered thirty-four students at the base of a steep hill and fitted them each with a weighted backpack. Asked to estimate the steepness of the hill, those standing next to friends gave lower estimates than those who were alone. The longer the friends had known each other, the less steep they perceived the hill.
Life is neither easy nor safe, a point driven home by those who argue that our obsession with protecting our children from harm is producing adults ill-equipped to prosper in a world that rewards the tough and tenacious.
A lack of snow due to rising temperatures has become a problem in New Hampshire and Vermont.
Bitter's challenge is to convince busy, results-oriented parents that the intense time commitment—up to five hours a day, six days a week, eleven months a year at the elite level—will pay off in their children developing skills that will ultimately enable them to succeed in the classroom and beyond. A 2015 poll found that more than a quarter of parents of high school athletes hope their offspring will play professional sports.
According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, less than 10 percent of high school athletes will go on to play collegiate sports, and of those, less than 1 percent will be drafted by the NFL, NBA, or MLB.
The culture created almost by accident in Norwich can be replicated elsewhere, but it requires parents to refrain from micromanaging their children's lives and instead act as their guides to charity, well-roundedness, curiosity, perspective, and a healthy life anchored by physical activity.
Norwich parents read to their offspring and encourage their interests. They volunteer at their schools and treat sports as a family bonding exercise. They attend their children's activities but they are easy to overlook because they remain in the background. They praise effort, not results, and send a loud and clear message that community trumps competition by embracing the success of children other than their own.
For more… find it at Amazon or Bookshop.org