elliott denman speaks on diversity + inclusion

MESSAGE FROM ELLIOTT DENMAN

I love track and field.
I love its total inclusiveness – there’s something in it for everybody.
It’s been that way seemingly forever.
It’s been the most democratic of pastimes in our nation virtually from Day One.
And I’m oh-so-proud to remind you that our own Shore Athletic Club has been doing it all so-very-well dating back to its own origins in the early 1930s.
While others – other sports, other athletic clubs – were brainlessly drawing ethnic boundaries and imposing participation limitations of one thoughtless kind or other, Shore  AC was always there to take the opposite route, as a great shining example of what America really-truly/ oh-so-surely should be.
If ever there was an All-American track and field team, that was Shore AC then and that is what Shore AC is now.
That make me very-very-very proud and I hope it makes all of us just as
very-very-very proud as I am right now and will forever continue to be.
These, of course, are doubly challenging days.
We’ve been self-contained since mid-March.  We still have no clear idea when we’ll be able to resume all our great activities – staging meets and races that provide huge opportunities to the whole world; fielding and supporting Varsity and Masters and Age-Group teams and then sending them out to compete against all their contemporaries, and setting one tremendous example to all of our communities.
We certainly hope you’ve been “hanging in there” best you can – one way or another.
We know how anxious you surely are to return to a degree of normalcy.
But until that great day comes, and our nation truly embraces the one-for-all, all-for-one view of all things, that our club and our sport represent so very well, let’s just continue doing all we can to weather the storm.
Yes, yes, yes, let's hope that the rest of the nation can do it as well as we have been doing all along.
Track and field metaphors seem to deliver this message best.  This is not a sprint but a marathon. There are high hurdles to clear.  All bars must be set high.  And we can’t possibly do it alone.  Life is a relay race forever.  The baton is in your hands, and mine. 
Run strongly, run bravely, dear Shore AC teammates.
Most sincerely.
Elliott Denman
Written from home, June 3, 2020