We've tried in recent years to cover sports in our region's three school districts, from having on board a regular sportswriter with top credentials to working with a former Pine Bush star quarterback to summarize local sports news each week. What happened this year? We've not been able to find the support we wished we could get to provide the level of coverage we feel our sports need, and decided that rather than run press pieces put out by a handful of our region's coaches, we'd wait out a year.

Look at our decision as being similar to that taken by Rondout Valley a few years back, to suspend its football program until it could rebuild enthusiasm with younger players. Ideally, we'd love to be able to work with local high school students with this coverage... but first we need to see some enthusiasm from them, and their schools.

In the interim, we'll do what we do with local arts and events coverage, and rely on the power of previewing what's coming up, the better to assure crowds for local athletes. And occasionally do a larger piece about what's happening in local sports from a regional perspective.

Along those lines, we're working on a piece about football in general, and whether it's facing as dubious a future as our national media's been saying in recent years. We're talking to coaches about what they're seeing in regards to younger players' skills and enthusiasm, as well as how administrators are taking new concussion laws and parental fears for a sport fast being overtaken by soccer as a mainstay of high school athletics.

Of course, we're also keeping tabs on what's been happening in professional (and professionalizing college) sports, including the big ongoing mess around violence in the NFL, and regressive attitudes amongst many sports fans in particular. Because no, there is never any excuse for abuse, be it of a partner or child. Period.

As for other things of interest out there, we were a bit surprised that one of our local dailies backed Bloomingburg's dissolution vote analysis given that it seemed a bit quickly done and cursory, especially given the pains Ellenville is going through in its own such process.

We were also very pleasantly surprised by the numbers who came out for the Climate Action march in New York last weekend, and by the strength of our President's speech before the United Nations this week — it displayed all his strengths, from a strong sense of realism to a clear sense of the ethics involved and how he must proceed on his own henceforth, not worrying over Congress' recalcitrance on the issue of global warming.

Along those lines, we were reminded of a fascinating piece we read this week about the findings of anthropologist Joe Henrich, who found in his studies of indigenous peoples around the world, using game-related surveys, that in the final rounds it's we in the West, and Americans in particular, who tend to think differently from everyone else. And not necessarily in a positive way.

Henrich found that most surveys establishing norms for social services and economics studies involve our nation's own college students, skewing the idea of the norm from the outset... which has changed the way these things are all looked at now. But more importantly, he found that many of our ways of seeing glasses half full or half empty have a built-in propensity now to weight towards those who tend towards the egocentric, the non-sharing.

More particularly, he and his partners — all top academics heavily funded by the world's leading research institutions — ended up finding that our American individualism, set up to counter all that is societal in nature, is not only far from the norm, but abnormal enough on a global scale to be considered downright weird. And this stretches over to the ways in which we feel about and interact with the natural world, have shifted our concept of religion and the spirit to match our egocentric world view, and shaped our very sense of science... and politics.

Weird, you say? In the end, Heinrich has said what he's been studying is not about good or bad, or value of any sort, but the ways we analyze and think.

Which makes it a major breakthrough, whether we want to believe him or not.