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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.

Basketball Tournaments on the Move?

March 3, 2017

It is uncertain where the Michigan High School Athletic Association Boys and Girls Basketball Tournaments, currently at the Breslin Center of Michigan State University, will be conducted in 2018 and 2019; and after that, there are questions of when they will be conducted.

The most serious of several concerns is that MSU can no longer guarantee Breslin’s availability for the MHSAA Semifinals and Finals. This is the result of a change in the format of the NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Tournament that assigns its 16 regionals to the top 16 seeded teams.

That schedule conflicts with the MHSAA Girls Basketball Semifinals and Finals in 2018 and 2020, and with the MHSAA Boys Basketball Semifinals and Finals in 2019.

In 2016, when MSU’s women’s basketball team was highly seeded, it had to travel to Mississippi State University because the MHSAA girls tournament was occupying Breslin. The contract that guarantees MHSAA priority ends with this year’s tournament, March 16-18.

The MHSAA is proceeding on two tracks. First, it has just distributed a “Request for Proposal” to MSU and other potential hosts for at least 2018 and 2019. There are options for venues to submit proposals for boys, girls or both.

Second, the MHSAA has begun what is likely to be a long discussion regarding dates. For example, if the girls season started and ended one week earlier, the NCAA conflict may not occur. However, this would likely require a one-week earlier end to the girls volleyball season in the fall, which some people have advocated but others are certain to oppose.

A flipside variation of this idea is to start and end boys basketball season two weeks earlier than is the case now, and to delay the start and end of girls basketball season by one week. This is a means of reducing the volleyball/basketball overlap for girls in November, and it would avoid that March weekend when the NCAA Division I women’s tournament can be a conflict.

Another option is to start the boys season one week earlier, extend the girls season one week later, and conduct the two tournaments simultaneously over four weeks – different days of the same weeks for Districts and Regionals; with Semifinals for both genders around the state on the weekend when the girls tournament has ended in the past; and then Finals for boys and girls at a single site on the Friday and Saturday when the boys tournament has traditionally ended.

Unless things change at the NCAA level, none of these models guarantees a schedule that is always free of conflicts with both the boys and girls MHSAA tournaments. Therefore, other innovative but possibly even more intrusive, changeable and tradition-breaking calendar adjustments could also be investigated that might provide a better long-term solution than merely changing venues.

Venue decisions are the responsibility of MHSAA management and should be made by early May. Calendar changes, if any, will be membership driven and may take more than 18 months to finalize.