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Anticipating Collateral Damage
March 23, 2018
When major college sports sneezes, high school sports usually catches a cold.
Throughout history, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has made changes in response to problems in college sports that have resulted in harm to high school sports.
Who can argue that relieving college coaches from the burden of being members of the instructional faculty did anything but weaken the connection between intercollegiate athletics and the educational mission of the sponsoring institutions? That major college football and men’s basketball coaches are the highest paid employees at many universities demonstrates the disconnection.
Who can argue that the creation of athletic grants in aid – scholarships – did anything but raise the pressures on college programs to win and to recruit hard at the high school level? Who can argue that this process got any more upright and above board when NCAA rules were changed to push most of the recruiting process to non-school venues and corporate concerns?
Who is surprised now that the corruption has moved beyond the NCAA’s ability to control and has resulted in investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigations and indictments followed by player ineligibilities and coach firings?
The worry now is that the NCAA and the National Basketball Association will strike again. Aiming to solve their problems, they likely will add to ours.
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Why Not National Events?
October 7, 2016
The constituent groups of the National Federation of State High School Associations are engaged in a deliberate discussion of the merits of conducting national high school sports championships. The topic has been raised and rejected by the National Federation membership multiple times over many years.
Support for such events is infrequently merit-based and more often found where political pressures have assaulted policies that have prohibited schools from participation in national tournaments by school teams and students representing schools. Opposition is based in both philosophical and practical concerns.
Proponents of national tournaments say such events will provide a platform to promote education-based athletic programs, but what we would often see – teams full of transfer students missing a lot of school – would undermine any positive promotional message. We would be saying one thing but doing another.
While more promotion of what we believe in might be nice, opponents believe national tournaments would worsen everyday problems and especially the most unsavory problems of school sports, namely undue influence and athletic-related transfers.
Opponents see national events as symptomatic of the "select the best and forget the rest" virus that is infecting much of youth sports that is neither school-sponsored nor student-centered. They see national events as causing school sports to move from ally to adversary of schools' educational mission. They see more loss of classroom instructional time, more travel, more costs and more local fundraising that saps community resources. They see the rich getting richer ... more for a few "haves" and less for most others, and nothing for the "have nots."
With each state having made its own decisions regarding when sports seasons will occur, many opponents wonder how any national tournament can serve the wide variety of seasons in place. Some sports that occur in the fall in one state are conducted in the winter or spring in other states. Even when sports occur in the same season in two states, the seasons may start and end two, three or four weeks differently. Do we really want our programs to place even more pressure on kids and coaches to specialize in a single sport year-around?
With each state having made its own decisions regarding the maximum number of contests, who is going decide what the national rule will be? Will it be the 18 games of one state or the 36 games of another? With each state having made its own decisions regarding age rules and transfer rules and out-of-season coaching rules, who is going to make and enforce these and all the other rules that must apply to all to assure the competition is fair?
And with four Michigan High School Athletic Association champions in most sports, which do we choose to represent our state? Do we really need to demean the champions of three classifications or divisions by advancing the fourth? Do we want our state finals to be the qualification for another level, or the ultimate experience for MHSAA member schools and students?