NOTHING IS FUN UNTIL YOU ARE GOOD AT IT.  Thus does Stanford's basketball coach Tara VanDerveer channel Vince Lombardi.

After Stanford dispatched U.C. Davis in the first round of the N.C.A.A. tournament, the Aggies’ coach, Sandy Simpson, noted that the Cardinal players made up for their one clear shortcoming — team speed — “by knowing the angles and getting to places sooner.”

“It’s like they see the game a second or two ahead as opposed to seeing it in real time,” he said.

Because the team collectively carries well above a B grade-point average, there is a tendency to ascribe the crispness of Stanford’s execution to the sharpness of the players’ minds. La Rocque suggested as much when she described one of the team’s assets: “We’re all students of the game; we’re all intelligent.”

VanDerveer let La Rocque have her say, then gave an impassioned rebuttal. She rejected the notion that her team’s path to the Final Four was somehow a velvet rope line because the players were book smart. The Cardinal’s success is a product of endless instruction, she said, not natural instincts.

“To say that we’re like these basketball brainiacs, they’re not,” VanDerveer said, adding: “In fact, I think we are less basketball-intelligent than a lot of teams. So we go over stuff constantly. I really believe that for me personally and for us, we have to outwork people.”

It helps if your players have the mindset that your world will fall apart if you don't beat the Bears, which in Stanford's case live in Berkeley or Waco, not Chicago.

But when it comes to getting your spawn into the proper preschool in order to subsequently get into the right basketball camp, or into Harvard, is it worth it?

There's not much difference in the outcomes of my friends who went to an Ivy League versus those that went to elite public schools or the not-quite Ivies, like Colgate or Oberlin or Kenyon. Everyone ended up in roughly the same upper middle class suburbs with professional jobs and Subarus in the driveway. Everybody is waiting on the same long lines at Disney and complaining about their long commutes to their ten hour jobs in the city.

So, if we all end up in the same place, why torture the kids like that? By nature, my kid is a slacker. He is perfectly capable of getting a 100% on every test, but he will work just hard enough to get a 93%. In the end, it's an A, so he'll knock off the studying when he gets to the 93% point and then pick up his DSI. I could get him to care about the difference between an 100% and 93%, but it would involve doing such violence to his personality that it isn't worth it.

We do set rules about the time spent playing video games and bedtime and all those good things that keep him from slipping from 93%'s down to 80%'s. We've started a Sunday afternoon writing club to plug the gaps in his education at his middle school, but I'm not running out and hiring a $100 per hour tutor. Trade-offs have been made.

That's the perspective from North Jersey. Suing preschool for undermining a four-year-old's shot at the Ivies is apparently the Manhattan thing to do. Egad