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Motivation is a prime mover. If you're not motivated, expect to be the same person tommorow that you are today. But if you want to change, and if you can identify the ways in which you'd like to change, you've taken the first step toward self-improvement.

I'm going to attempt to give you some help in this area. If you're on this web-site, I expect that you're trying to become a better track and field athlete. If I were selfish, I'd be handing this information to my own team and noone else. I'd like to see my team rack up another undefeated season (we've had quite a few) but if so, I'd like them to earn it against the best competition in the state.

Until March 19th, each day I'll provide some food for thought. I'm aiming it at the North Attleboro girls, but if it helps anyone else - so be it! After these links I'll provide my rationale for "motivating all-comers".

Three North Attleboro alumni (Latif Thomas, Janet Pailes and Linzi Calderone) gave their thoughts on goal setting in 2003.

Emily Estey is North Attleboro's most prolifict scorer, was both a multiple state champion and a New England Champion, as well as a Yale captain and Heps Champ. Here is an '03 article she wrote about goal setting.

Back in the early 1980's I decided that it was important to help female athletes find a way to "meet self-actualization." That was a buzz-word at the time. In other words, if they wanted to take charge of their lives I wanted to help them do so.

It was a far different world back then. Title 9 was still in its infancy and when boys had more opportunities than women, it was considered "the way it was!"

But then I chanced to have a daughter at the same time that I started coaching track (the only track meet I've missed since 1979 was the day she was born - since the meet was against Sharon my team thought that's what I should name her. What if it had been King Philip?!?)

My eyes were opened to the fact that women had been short-changed along the way - not just in recent times but perhaps for the entirety of historical time. I was a living part of it.

At UCONN the boys had more sport opportunities than girls. We had better facilities, and the fact that my future wife was relegated to the small gyms, small crowds and smaller travel stipends meant absolutely nothing to me. It's not that I was a chauvenist pig, it's just that what the "men" were doing was much more important that what the "girls" wanted to do.

Maybe it is my way of making up for having a short-sighted male viewpoint, or a response to the incredible way in which the female athletes in North Attleboro have enriched my life. But the bottom line is that I feel indebted to serious female athletes for the things they have done to balance the scales in society.