The Quality of Effort: Integrity in Sport and Life for Student-Athletes, Parents and Coaches officially made its way into the world on February 27, 1991. It looked like this:
Today, December 10, 2012 the 2nd edition, revised for 2013, made its debut as a trade paperback and a softcover workbook, both of which are also available as Kindle editions.
The new book’s cover appears at the top of the sidebar to the right, and you can find out more by clicking on that cover, which will take you to http://qualityofeffort.com.
Testimonials for both the 1991 and 2013 editions are available here.
BOOK DESCRIPTION FOR 2013
The 2013 edition of The Quality of Effort and The Quality of Effort Workbook marry literature and sport, story and effort, the thrill of experience and the “dignities and disasters” of our interpretations. Reggie Marra speaks to us through the soul of a poet-athlete-teacher-caregiver and kid who got cut from the team he later went on to coach.
He invites us into the worlds of Mary Catherine Bateson and Ken Wilber; Bob Knight and Boethius; Joan Benoit Samuelson and Don Beck; and Sacred Heart High School’s 1979-1980 boys’ junior varsity basketball team.
If you’ve been waiting for a perspective on youth, interscholastic, and intercollegiate sport that embraces The Consolation of Philosophy, Spiral Dynamics, Man’s Search for Meaning and the Bhagavad Gita, and yet at its core is all about your favorite topic—you, your wait is over.
Marra takes us by the hand and challenges us to inquire into our own values, behaviors, and relationships within the complexity of the 21st-Century environments in which we live, learn, work and play. If we’re willing to take up the challenge, this inquiry helps us see ourselves and all those heroes and villains out there from increasingly comprehensive and balanced perspectives.
“Preaching” only what he practices, in The Quality of Effort, Reggie Marra authentically engages each of us to become increasingly more aware of our stories—the interpretations we choose, and how they affect, and even effect, what we do next as parents, coaches, student-athletes and human beings.
Reggie Marra, MA, PCC 