Becoming Busy or Busy Becoming?
October 30, 2015
While I have served the MHSAA as an employee and several other organizations as a volunteer board member, I have gradually and probably too slowly learned to be more on the lookout for ways to help move these organizations from transactional to transformational business … from mundane and routine tasks that tread water to sea-change strategies that might cause an organization to alter its course.
I have tried to do this in different ways at different times with different organizations; but I was recently handed an idea that I think will work with almost every organization at almost any time. A speaker said, “Are we busy doing, or are we busy becoming?
That question captures the essential difference between transaction and transformation. If every board meeting and staff meeting and committee meeting would start with that question, and/or be used at the end of the meeting as the evaluation tool, the work would broaden in scope and deepen in impact. Little issues would give way to larger topics, and fascination with fads would give way to focus on future trends in our work or in society as a whole that could affect the enterprise in fundamental ways.
Are we busy doing things that will help us become not just a little but very much better at what we do? Are we striving to break down or through barriers that hold us back? Are we searching for fundamental changes not just in how we do things but how we see things? Are we enlarging our vision? Are we searching not just for new ways to do old things, but also to discover altogether new things to do that will cause us to become what our greatest aspirations desire?
New World, New Needs
October 3, 2017
The core of our current transfer rule was debated by a predecessor organization 20 years before the Michigan High School Athletic Association existed, in 1904. The MHSAA’s first handbook stated the rule in 1925: a one-semester wait to play after a change of schools, unless accompanied by a residential change by the student and parents or guardians. A one-semester wait, with one exception.
In 1971, the number of stated exceptions went from one to twelve.
It’s in 1981 when sentiment seemed to shift toward a harder line when the exception from a “broken home” approved by both school principals was toughened to require a completed divorce decree and a form signed by both principals and the MHSAA executive director.
When the transfer rule was adopted, the world was different than today. In 1904, 1925, 1971, even 1981, it was both a different society and youth sports landscape.
There were many more three-sport athletes then than today and many more three-sport coaches. There were many fewer non-school youth sports programs then than now, and many fewer nonfaculty coaches. And, of course, there was no school of choice.
Increasing year-round single-sport specialization by both students and coaches; ubiquitous specialized sports camps, clinics, trainers, travel teams and leagues – where both students and parents are making friends; more reliance on drop-in, nonfaculty coaches for school teams; and expanding open enrollment laws have combined to change our world.
And they combine to suggest the need for more changes in the MHSAA transfer rule.