BOTF x 2
April 5, 2013
“Battle of the Fans,” an idea of the MHSAA Student Advisory Council, is one of the best ideas to ever flow from the MHSAA. It has provided a new way of promoting one of the oldest, and most important, defining features of school sports. That’s sportsmanship.
Where schools have participated in BOTF, attending school sports events is becoming cool again. Crowds are larger and more positive. Students and administrators are having positive discussions about sportsmanship. Media are reporting on the positive changes they are seeing.
Take a look on MHSAA.com at the videos submitted by 27 schools this year to enter the second BOTF competition. Look at the videos prepared for the five finalists after the MHSAA’s onsite visit.
Spectator stands are filled with students – happy, engaged, energetic, cheering students. Exactly what we want in school sports; exactly what is missing from other youth sports programs.
It’s our advantage – energized students, cheerleaders, pep bands, marching bands and mascots. It’s what we have and what the AAU doesn’t have; what US Soccer Development Academies don’t have; what club volleyball lacks and what travel ice hockey is missing.
Using YouTube and Facebook, BOTF is a new way to present and an energetic way to promote school sports that is local, student-centered, high spirited and highly sportsmanlike.
Congratulations to our two winners so far – Frankenmuth in 2012 and Buchanan in 2013.
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.