Author: Jerry Leger

The way it happened has an almost cruel quality. After defeating Liberty 51-7, Middletown High School’s football team left the field with the season still alive and the state championship still theoretically within reach. title number five. A program with that kind of background understands the significance of that. A few days later, the school community received an email that caused everything they had worked so hard to come to an end due to a paperwork issue. The Maryland Public Secondary School Athletic Association was notified of the infraction by the school. It appears that an ineligible student-athlete participated in…

There’s a certain energy in the air when you walk through the campus of any aerospace company in Southern California or Seattle; it’s somewhere between focused ambition and quiet confidence. It wasn’t by accident that the engineers who entered those buildings each morning earned six-figure salaries. They placed a well-thought-out wager on a particular piece of paper, and it was profitable. That observation is supported by compelling data. According to Federal Reserve Bank of New York labor market data from 2025, graduates in aerospace engineering make a median yearly salary of $134,830 by mid-career. Electrical engineering completes the top three…

An intriguing event occurs prior to AJ Buckley taking the wrestling mat. He’s not practicing defensive footwork in his head or running through takedown sequences. “Spanish Joint” by D’Angelo is playing for him. Just in his head, not through earbuds. The song’s groove, rhythm, and subtle confidence. It’s his ritual, his reset button, his method of settling in before a match that requires all of his mental and physical resources. Alvin “AJ” Buckley Jr., a junior at Jackson’s Mississippi School for the Blind, started wrestling in the seventh grade. He suffers from Retinitis Pigmentosa, a hereditary eye condition that can…

The same scene can be found in nearly every high school athletic office across the nation: an athletic director who appears to have not slept since preseason, a desk buried under schedules, and a whiteboard covered in numbers that don’t quite add up. The work has always been hard. However, the people who do it will tell you straight out that something has changed in recent years—the math simply doesn’t work anymore. The cost of equipment continues to rise. Before winter sports even start, fuel prices drive transportation budgets over the edge. In the midst of all of that, it…

On a Saturday in early May, something truly overdue occurred on the north shore of Maui, where the trade winds press flat against the water and the waves at Hoʻokipa Beach Park have a way of arriving in sets that look almost too perfect to be real. In Hawaii’s first-ever state surfing championship, nearly 180 high school students competed on longboards, shortboards, and bodyboards over the course of two full days of competition that the majority of the mainland most likely missed completely. However, it had significance in Hawaii. It’s difficult to ignore how long this really took. In 2004,…

While most American children were sitting through third-period math on a Tuesday morning in April, Kelsey Rhae, a TikTok influencer, was filming her kids helping her clean the car. Day One of unschooling was what she called it. She took them grocery shopping at Aldi later that day, where they picked produce, read food labels, and counted change. Before the end of the week, the video had received 460,000 views. The remarks weren’t totally polite. Almost immediately, criticism poured in, accusing Rhae of passing off routine tasks as instruction. However, Rhae’s supporters were equally vocal in their claims that authentic…

On the campus of Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, there is a building that most people pass by without giving it a second look. The Center for Durham Computation. A replica of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, the first electronic digital computer in history, is located inside behind glass on the ground floor. It was constructed in this basement in the late 1930s by a graduate student and a mathematics professor. It’s likely that the majority of visitors don’t fully comprehend what they are viewing. It’s possible that Iowa State has always been that kind of organization—doing amazing things in places…

In one version of this tale, JJ Watt enrolls at Central Michigan as an offensive lineman, vanishes into obscurity, and no documentary is ever produced about him. It came very close to happening. And it’s because of that near-miss that his college experience is worth studying, not only as football history but also as an example of knowing oneself before others do. Watt was raised in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, a tiny community outside of Milwaukee where hockey is a religion and the winters are harsh. He traveled to Canada and Germany with competitive teams, played ice hockey from the age of…

Someone decided that the current architecture of American higher education wasn’t suitable for everyone, and there is a building somewhere that is probably more modest than its aspirations suggest. Harvest Christian University, which operates outside the well-known bounds of federal oversight, state regulation, and regional accreditation bodies and appears perfectly comfortable doing so, was born out of that quiet and mostly unnoticed decision by mainstream academia. To comprehend Harvest Christian University’s accreditation, one must first acknowledge that accreditation is a multifaceted concept. The majority of people envision a stamp from a regional organization such as SACSCOC or HLC. However, this…

Even though most people would prefer to forget it, there is a moment that they all recognize. Opening a pension statement, staring at a mortgage offer, or standing at a bank counter—and having that subtle, nagging feeling that nothing makes sense. The numbers behind the words feel like a foreign language, not because the words themselves are unclear. It turns out that, contrary to what anyone in authority has been willing to acknowledge, that moment occurs far more frequently in Britain. The Richmond Project, an organization whose entire mission is based on the idea that confidence with numbers creates a…