The Quality of Effort: Integrity in Sport and Life for Student-Athletes, Parents and Coaches

Reggie Marra is a poet, educator, Integral Coach(TM) and author. A former high school teacher, basketball coach, athletic director and college administrator, he embraces sports and the arts, among other disciplines, as having value in themselves and as vehicles for ongoing human development, cultural transformation and personal, organizational, local, national and global sanity. Reggie returned to his alma mater, Sacred Heart High School in Yonkers, NY, where he taught in the English, Business and Religion departments, and coached boys basketball in the New York CHSAA from 1975 through 1988. An alumnus of St. John’s University (B.S. 1976) and Iona College (M.A. 1990), both in New York, he published the first edition of The Quality of Effort in 1991 as a reflection on the interplay of talent, effort and results in his own experiences as a student-athlete and a coach. In addition to this 2013 edition of The Quality of Effort and the companion Quality of Effort Workbook, he is also the author of This Open Eye: Seeing What We Do-Poems 2003-2005, which Naomi Shihab Nye called a book of ＂stunning, graphic precision＂ whose ＂poems are tributes to the nearly-invisible wounded and the honest humanity so many of us yearn for now,＂ Who Lives Better Than We Do?, released in 2001, and the 2004 Living Poems, Writing Lives: Spirit, Self and the Art of Poetry, an invitation to readers to use poetry writing as a vehicle for self-knowledge. Reggie brings an integrally informed perspective to sports, poetry-writing and leadership. In addition to his Integral Coaching(R) certification, he is an Associate Certified Coach with the International Coach Federation, a Certified Leadership Agility 360 Assessment Facilitator, a Teaching/Integrating Artist with the Connecticut State Office of the Arts and a founding partner at ParadoxEdge. You can find out more about his work at http: //reggiemarra.com, http: //qualityofeffort.com, and http: //paradoxedge.com.