Miami Heat NBA basketball Coach Stan Van Gundy has resigned from his coaching position citing family interests. I liked his comments:
Van Gundy has always professed to being a family-first man, someone who abhors road trips and the idea of spending holidays away from his wife and four children. He said that because of travel, games and practices, he would have seen his children at home only 49 days out of 170 this season.
"That's just not enough any more for me. It's just not enough," Van Gundy said. "I mean, it's been like that for my kids' entire lives. I've got a 14-year-old daughter and it started to hit me when I started thinking about her birthday, which was last month. I've got four more years left with her. Four. And then she'll be off to college and I'm just not willing to sacrifice any more of those four more years."
Van Gundy said he began wrestling with the balance between job and family during the preseason, and told Riley after the regular-season opener at Memphis that they needed to talk about the future.
"I can't believe people have that big a problem actually believing that someone would actually want to spend time with their family," Van Gundy said. "I don't know why that's so hard for people to buy into."
Did the pressure of the job and his relative success at it factor in to his decision? I'm sure it did. But Van Gundy is right. Why can't our society accept that sometimes family actually may be important.
As a father of girls myself I can say he'll always be glad he had those four years.
2 comments:
Great point, Alan!
One of the reasons I dislike meetings, not that I hold that many, is that I miss up to a week of my boys lives (much less my warm bed with my bride).
We ought to appreciate an unselfish thought when we see it - particularly when it is so rare.
Yeah, I don't have to worry about meetings keeping me away from my girls to often, either!
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