Sports of all sorts: interview with LN's athletic director

--- an insider's look at the job of athletic director Mike Penrose as he wraps up his second year at the helm

Often seen working away in his office or roaming the varios athletic complexes at Lawrence North, athletic director Mike Penrose is wrappin up his second year in charge of a major school's athletics. His role wasn't always in athletics, yet he finds himself here today and his journey and tenure are more than meets the eye.

This is your second year as Athletic Director. What do you think of this job? Does it meet your initial expectation?

I love this job. This is something that I’ve been wanting to do since I stopped coaching. I’ve been here for twenty-three years. Lawrence North has been my life. My first eighteen years I was a math teacher, then I was the swim coach, and also helps with the baseball team. Prior to this job I was an assistant principal for three years, and now this is my second year as athletic director.

What part of your job you like the most? Why?

I love watching teams. I love seeing the development of young people. I love the excitement that high school athletics generates. I love seeing how proud kids are representing their school. I enjoy the young people trying to reach their goals, working hard and seeing it paid off. The idea of leading to success down to classrooms and the community, that’s what I like.

Is there anything that surprised you in this job? Something that you wish you knew when you accepted it?

Not really. I knew what I’m getting into, because I worked closely with Dr. Nesbit and Mr. Zeller as a coach, and I supervised several athletic events as assistant principal. I was very prepared in my role based on different experiences I had, as I know ins and outs of what it took to run an athletic department.

How is your working relationship with Mr. Zeller, your assistant director?

Once I got to this job, having Mr. Zeller as somebody I could go to, that was extremely helpful, because he has been an athletic director himself for number of years. Just working with him make the transition very easy.

Dr Nesbit (the district athletic director), was your predecessor in this job. How is your working relation with him?

We worked together for number of years, and we had a really good working relationship. It is very good to have him to be able to call for advices, and also as an advocate for us in the central office.

What has been your biggest challenge so far in this job? How did you resolve it?

Thinking back, I haven’t really faced one. If there is any issue, I tried to work the problem and get a solution that is amicable to all parties.

How is the athletic facility renovations taking your time?

It’s stacking up a lot of time, but we want to make sure we did that right. My time over the last year has really been involved with those types of meetings. We are looking for solutions on how both inside and outside constructions are going to help our student athletes in long term. We still have a lot of things that are in the process.

Last question: Terry Bradshaw or Ben Roethlisberger?

Well, Bradshaw was 4-0 in Super Bowl, and Roethlisberger is 2-1, so I’d have to go with Bradshaw. But Roethlisberger is close second!

An edited version of this interview appeared in the 19 May 2017 edition of North Star, the student newspaper of Lawrence North High School, Indianapolis. This would also my final piece in a year-long stint with the amazing faculty and staff members.

Mothers of the world, unite!

May 14th is Mother’s Day in the United States. We — me and my host family — celebrated it by getting into our boat, roamed around Geist Reservoir, and had a good dinner in nearby lakefront restaurant.

Throughout social medias, my friends (both Americans and fellow Indonesian exchange students here) almost uniformly posted the pictures of their mother (and exchange mothers, for my fellow exchange students), showing their appreciation to them. Very millennial, I should say: Instagram posts with bunch of tags and Facebook writings with flowery languages? All that is in my news feed.

But what is the real meaning of Mother’s Day, may I ask? Is it just a commercial fiesta of motherhood, or a genuine appreciation with serious concerns to a larger picture of issues?

Before that, of course, let me tell you a story.

I never doubt that I was lucky to born into a great family.

We are middle-class, if you’re using Indonesian standard of economic status. Two working parents with stable job and comfortable house, with kids in good schools. We are not rich, nowhere close, but there is nothing in our social-economic status that bar us from dreaming. All of our relatives, too, are hardworking middle-class folks in the urban society of 21st century Indonesia.

And we’re in majority. I hate to say this, but me and my family is and always part of the privileged majority. We’re Muslims: eighty-five per cent of Indonesians, at least, are Muslims. We never had difficulty to pray in our mosques or access halal food sources. We’re pribumis, a large but abstract Austronesian ethnic group that made up of nearly ninety-five per cent of Indonesians. We are not immigrants like our fellow Chinese, Arabs, or Eurasians: we are native of this land. And of course, we’re part of the middle-class. Kelas menengah, seventy-four million Indonesians that emerged from the post-Soeharto economic boom and shaped the modern state of the country with their political and economic power.

My host mother liked to say that she, a white, middle-class woman from the Midwest, is the least likely category of people that will be pulled off by the police in highways. White privilege, that phrase exists in American social discourse.

In Indonesia, people like me and my family has such privilege.

My mother always rise earlier than anyone in our family. She usually rose at four o’clock in the morning. Since we moved out from our old house to our new one earlier this year, she always walked across the street to the mosque for Subuh prayer. And then she would return to prepare breakfast for us. If she had morning class at campus — which is rare — she would drive me and my sister to our schools. If not, my father would.

And then she have another hour or two before she depart to her campus in downtown Pekanbaru. She usually have classes in 10 am or 2 pm, depending on her (very) flexible schedule. (I always envy those college professors with flexible teaching hours while we kids must suffer of long and boring class hours at school, but that’s the another story). She and my father will then pick us up from school on the evening, and then had dinner together, at home or somewhere else.

My mother often had classes on the weekend, Saturdays and Sundays, but those classes never bar her from spending her time with her family. She still found time for her hobbies: watering her flowers, designing stuff for our new home, whatever that makes her happy.

She found time to wait for my sister’s additional math lessons, to visit relatives across the town with my grandmother, to cash my grandparent’s pension check every first weeks of the month, and to attend parent-teacher conferences at her children’s school. (The latter, sometimes creeps me out, because when you’re 16 you don’t want your parents to know whatever the hell you’re up to at school.)

Also, my mother is a dreamer. She loves to travel to new places. When we’re living in Malaysia, we took a lot of trips during weekends and holidays. She talks a lot about places she had wanted to go: Makkah, of course, but also Europe and the United States.

And she make her children to dream, too. She freed her children to do whatever they want to do in life. Unlike most of Indonesian parents that valued STEM as an ultimate pass to future career opportunities, she and my father never questioned me when I decided to choose social sciences as my concentration in high school.

Both of them are civil engineers by trade with two PhD from abroad: natural scientists of highest degrees, not writers or painters or poets. My freshman year, they forcefully opposed my high school’s principal when the school tried to place me in STEM concentration. Because they know that my talent would only be wasted if I spent three years of high school solving linear equations or chemical reactions. If that’s not a 21st century parenting for you, I don’t know what’s that.

And she also pushed me to go through the exchange student program. She was reluctant at first — of course, every parent will be reluctant to let their teen-age son to go to a foreign land — but like a true college professor and a analytically-minded scientist, she pushed me forward when I began to gain ground. After all, she and my father attended schools in foreign countries, too.

But this is not only the story of my mother, per se. This is a story of women’s role in our modern world. This is a story of gender equality in 21st century. This is a story of the great mothers that shaped our world with their mouths, hands, and brains.

Before I moved here to the United States, I never know what gender equality is. Feminism is not a clear concept for me, at least. I never read Gloria Steinem or Judith Butler. I never even care about it. 

But I know that men and women are supposed to be allowed to do whatever they want to do. I know that it is not right to discriminate by the account of sex. I know that patriarchy is something that must not be defended. But I never know it from literary books or historical accounts. I know it from my own eyes, from my own experiences.

I’m of Minangkabau heritage. Minang people, the settlers of western coast of Sumatera, is the world’s largest matrilineal society. Lands and properties, for Minangs, are passed from mothers and daughters. It is a straight antidote of a patriarchy. The mothers, the bundo kanduangs, are the most powerful part of Minangkabau society. And at the same time, we kept our Islamic faith, with its more patriarchal senses, close to our heart. 

We Minangs never carry our father’s name, as it always our mother’s or from our mother’s line. How Americans and Europeans always carry their father’s last name into their own name is something that completely different, for me. And we Minangs, safe to say, are one of the most prominent ethnic group in Indonesia. We are three of four Founding Fathers of Indonesia, not to forget countless number of businessmen, statesmen, military officers, and whatnots. We holds economic and political power for years and years, often somewhat disproportionate with our small number of population.

Minang women has been government ministers, ambassadors, professors, military generals, religious leaders, business executives, whatever you want. Believe me, in term of success and opportunity, we are probably one of the most gender-equal society in the world. And Indonesia I grew up is a country that allow its women to freely and actively participate in the affairs of the nation.

I was three year-old when Megawati Soekarnoputri’s, our first (and only, to date) president, took power. Powerful women political figures like finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati and Surabaya mayor Tri Rismaharini are staples of our political life. Hell, we even require 30% of all House of Representative candidates to be women. What could be worse than that?

Then I moved to the United States and realized that my experience is an exception, not a widely-accepted fact. I was truly shocked when learning about the suffragette movement, the likes of Susan B. Anthony, in my AP US History class. That American women was once fighting, literally with their lives, to get their voice heard inside a political system, is actually staggering for me.

Indonesia has universal suffrage even since our first election in 1955. If anybody — ANYBODY — would try to deny my grandmother, or my mother, or any other Indonesian women access to their ballot box, I’d guarantee them lose their job the next day.

United States has no nationally-mandated full-coverage paid maternity leave, has limited resource to federal funding of women’s health (as Planned Parenthood keep getting attacked from left and right), and still has one of the industrialized world’s broadest gender pay gap.

My mother had three months of paid maternity leave, full coverage. Her — and ours — health insurance, a government-operated single-payer system, guaranteed her health for the rest of her life. She earns almost the same wage as my father, both of them government-employed college professors.

And in political roles, I saw the struggle of American society to elect the first woman president, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016. You know how that one turned out, right?

I am never an expert on equality. But I experienced it, and I know that other people should, too.

This Mother’s Day, I decide to review back my experience. I had the privilege to spend an amazing year here in the United States. Everything that I had experienced made me socially, politically, and economically more conscious than ever. And of course, in this matter of equality, I’m no longer ignorant like before.

Equality is no longer important: it’s urgent. We need to talk, more than ever, about how our society must be open to a more equal role of men and women. I’m speaking to the mothers and fathers, daughters and sons of the world, that nothing should bar them from achieving what they want in their life. We need to solve the problems that obstruct the girls from achieving what the boys can without any significant difficulties.

My mother never afraid to dream, and she never allow us, her children, to do so. She has her great career ahead of her while raising her two children in a loving family with her husband. She never let her gender to limit her: in fact, it is what empowered her.

We need to talk. We need to be open. We need to debate. We need to discuss. Right now. Right here.