Balance

May 12, 2015

Recently, there has been a lot of sports talk banter, as well as texting, tweeting and blogging, about the preferred value that major college football coaches place on the multi-sport high school athletes during the recruiting process.
Ohio State’s Urban Meyer tweeted that 42 of his first 47 signed recruits at OSU were multi-sport high school athletes. Utah’s football coaching staff followed with a report that 37 of 47 players on their two-deep roster last season played at least two sports in high school. Other programs have produced similar statistics.
College coaches from coast to coast report a preference for high school athletes who have competed in multiple seasons and who have developed, for example, greater quickness and agility during wrestling or basketball season, or better speed during track season.
Against these preferences are the pressures of youth sports organizations which program year-round as well as the misguided impressions of parents who believe single-sport focus is essential to obtaining a college athletic scholarship. Escalating college costs add fuel. And sometimes nonfaculty high school coaches who are hired for a single sport overemphasize the single-sport experience in students’ lives.
Those who lead school sports know the score – the foolishness of chasing college financial aid on the playing field. The chances of getting any financial aid based on participation in a single sport – much less a full “scholarship” – are extremely low. It’s closer to a gamble than a good investment.
As is the case with so much in life, good balance is best.

The Past, Present and Future of Golf

June 19, 2018

The game of golf can and does reveal both the good and bad sides of people. Think you might want to hire a person for a job? Then take that person golfing. Observe. If that person can’t count all his or her strokes on a golf course, you can’t count on that person in life.

Golf claims to need and nurture integrity like no other sport. It does not prescribe or require a contest official to observe every action but is designed to be a game where each competitor plays the ball as it is found and counts every attempt to hit it. The rules of golf are without leniency for a player who records an incorrect score yet depend on that player, and no one else, to count all strokes and assess any penalties that add to the score.

As a youngster, I played regularly with my parents. My mother was the club rules chairperson for many years. I was told in no uncertain terms to “play my ball as it lies and tell no lies about my play.” 

Golf certainly has its detractors ... for example, its pace is slow and its price is high. But over years, and with enlightenment that arrived too slowly, golf has addressed its worst blind spots and opened its choicest courses and its most chauvinistic hearts to females and minorities. Its recent outreach to youth is marvelous; its ongoing support of charities is magnificent.

A recent controversy over scores posted by a small group of players at a Michigan High School Athletic Association Regional Golf Tournament has caused some local tarnish on this illustrious worldwide game and brought embarrassment to some players and their schools as well as some criticism of the MHSAA. It was alleged that players from more than one team who were assigned to the same competitive groupings colluded to post lower scores than they actually earned. Neither their coaches nor administrators discovered a crack in the players’ stories, or in their solidarity, in spite of repeated questioning. There was no evidence of acts of cheating, but a suspicious anomaly in the players’ scores caused concern at the Regional meet and since.

If there was a conspiracy of cheating, it was the players who are at fault, which must be shared by the adults in their lives who may have been unable to nurture character to the same degree they developed skills.  

If the only solution to questions of players’ shaving strokes is adult supervision of every grouping at every Regional of all four Divisions, then the soul of the game and much of what it is supposed to teach is lost, and the time spent on the sport may be unjustifiable. At least that’s what our state golf coaches association argued a decade ago when coaches were granted relief from being assigned to accompany groupings and “observe” players. They said they wanted to coach their own kids and not be required to count the strokes of other players.

Studies in other states have demonstrated that golf is the school sport which, on a per-participant basis, causes students to lose more classroom instructional time than any other sport. It’s played off school grounds and very often with non-faculty coaches. It generates no revenue to offset expenses. Add in dissatisfaction with the court-ordered change of seasons for MHSAA Lower Peninsula golf tournaments 10 years ago — and this recent ugly and, for some, unsettled incident — and one is left with more reasons than not for the MHSAA to discontinue tournament sponsorship of golf.

But I love the sport! I grew up playing golf with my parents and spent hundreds more hours with them than my siblings who did not play the game. I had a few great rounds when I was a youngster and eventually settled on the goal of being among the 10 percent of all golfers who break 90. I love the colors and contours of challenging courses, which in my prime I preferred to play at their full length, from the toughest tees and with no “gimmies” on the greens. I now watch more golf on television than any other sport. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about golf over the past decade, but have found little traction when talking about changing traditions of high school golf in Michigan ... for example, in favor of a Ryder Cup style team tournament — perhaps even coed — conducted in both Spring and Fall where schools (or their leagues) choose the season that fits their needs best. While the NCAA still conducts a Spring championship, it has “modernized” its tournament with match play, and television ratings reveal broader public appeal for the team format that professional players seem to relish. Might we make some changes to modernize high school competition in this state?

This tradition-soaked sport needs to be energized, not eliminated at the high school level. Most of all, it needs to be introduced earlier in rural and urban junior high/middle schools to create the interest and cultivate the skill that will lead to larger and more stable high school golf programs.