Back in the day, when I was at Livonia Stevenson,
during Clinton's first term in office, we didn't really
have structured demands on practice. We played
questions, and we looked up what we wanted to know, and
however well we did, we did. (Wow, I can't believe it was
that long ago since I played a lightning round).
And we did OK for ourselves, we didn't always win,
but we didn't burn out and a couple of us have had
successful college careers, (OK, one of us, but that's still
pretty good), and at the same time, we came within one
bad judgment call of winning the 1995 State
Championship (I'm sorry, a googol and a googolplex are NOT the
same thing, and the Siberian, I mean, Trans-Siberian
Railroad are also not the same thing, but I digress. The
whole problem is that both my junior years in high
school and college, I lost the last game of the year by
a mere five points. But, I won't complain too much,
after all, it's an honor to have gotten that far in the
first place.)
I think the key to practice and
learning is really this. It's a game, it's up to you to
decide how good you want to be at it, and how you can
best serve your team.