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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE-Dec. 16, 2002
Contact: John Johnson or Randy Allen
517.332.5046 or www.mhsaa.com

EAST LANSING, Mich. - Dec. 13 - Getting the word out about the need for good sportsmanship at high school athletic events is a daily task for the Michigan High School Athletic Association, which has been joined by the Detroit Pistons and star guard Chauncy Billups in producing a series of announcements for use by radio stations as public service announcements and schools as public address announcements.

Billups recently recorded four sportsmanship messages addressing sports rage on the part of parents, the reasons why officials hang up their whistles, how actions speak louder than words, and how people's response to winning and losing shows how good of a sport they are. The four messages range from 20 to 25 seconds in length.

The Sportsmanship page MHSAA Web site www.mhsaa.com will serve as the distribution vehicle for the announcements. The four files will be available for download or playback on the Sportsmanship page in MP3 and WAV formats.

You can never do enough to promote sportsmanship, and we're pleased to have Chauncy Billups and the Detroit Pistons organization join us in this endeavor," said John E. "Jack" Roberts, executive director of the MHSAA. "We hope that radio stations across the state will run these messages in their regular programming and local broadcasts of high school sporting events, and that schools will play these announcements on their public address systems prior to the start of games to help set a sportsmanlike tone for the event."

Billups, a 6-3 guard, is in his seventh year in the National Basketball Association, his first year with the Pistons.

The MHSAA is a private, not-for-profit corporation of voluntary membership by over 1,300 public and private senior high schools and junior high/middle schools which exists to develop common rules for athletic eligibility and competition. No government funds or tax dollars support the MHSAA, which was the first such association nationally to not accept membership dues or tournament entry fees from schools. Member schools which enforce these rules are permitted to participate in MHSAA tournaments, which attract approximately 1.6 million spectators each year.