Anti-Participation Fees
August 23, 2016
Last month the Michigan High School Athletic Association released results of a survey of its member high schools regarding participation fees – a.k.a., “pay for play.” This was the 12th survey since the 2003-04 school year, making this the largest and longest record of school trends on this troublesome topic.
In spite of almost universal condemnation of the practice of charging students fees to participate in school-sponsored sports, the practice is now ingrained in the fabric of educational athletics, with more than 50 percent of reporting MHSAA member high schools indicating they require at least modest payments as a condition of playing on school-sponsored competitive sports teams.
The most recent survey of 557 reporting high schools revealed 51.5 percent charging fees, the same percentage as the year before, but down from a high of 57 percent two years ago. The percentage of schools with fees exceeded 50 percent for the first time in 2010-11.
While the MHSAA believes participation fees are counter-productive for schools and communities, the MHSAA offers a guide to “best practices” where school leaders have determined there are no better choices for providing necessary financial support for the interscholastic athletic program. Click here for this guide as well as the current and previous surveys.
Among the core values of school sports is a program that is inexpensive for students to play and for families to watch. The program should have great breadth and depth, appealing to many different students and open to all who have interest and meet high standards of eligibility and conduct.
Participation fees that discourage and limit participation are antithetical to these core values of educational athletics.
Our Open Tournament
April 15, 2016
One of the criticisms we hear as a result of not seeding the MHSAA Girls and Boys Basketball Tournaments is that it doesn’t allow the best teams to avoid one another until later rounds of the tournament and often leads to anticlimactic Semifinal and Final games.
But, after spending thousands of hours and perhaps a million dollars to seed its Division I men’s basketball tournament, the NCAA had a 17-point mismatch when a No. 10 seed met a No. 1 seed in one national semifinal and a 44-point blowout between a pair of so-called No. 2 seeds in the other national semifinal.
Seeding is such an imperfect art, and teams can play so unpredictably from one day to the next in a one-and-done tournament, that seeding is more of a publicity stunt than it is a science on which to structure a tournament.
To send a team and its fans packing to distant venues on the basis of its winning percentage and margins of victory relative to other teams is not responsible policy at the high school level. It could be unsound fiscally and unsound educationally.
Our high schools enjoy a format that allows every high school entry into the MHSAA’s postseason tournament every year. If we were to limit our tournament to only 68 teams like the NCAA, seeding might be more practical. But as long as we accommodate 750 high schools in our Boys Basketball Tournament and 750 in our Girls Basketball Tournament, geographical districts with blind draws may be most appropriate.
The NCAA tournament, like so much of major college sports, caters to the few and most fortunate; so maybe seeding is good in that environment. But our high school basketball tournaments are open to all schools, and they require we make different decisions to serve those schools.