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.
Summer Football Safety
July 23, 2018
(This blog first appeared on MHSAA.com on June 23, 2017.)
Across the U.S. this summer, school-age football players are flocking to camps conducted by colleges and commercial interests. They get outfitted in full gear and launch themselves into drills and skills work.
Unlike the start of the interscholastic football season, the players usually do this without several days of acclimatization to avoid heat illness, and without limits on player-to-player contact to reduce head injuries.
Required precautions of the school season are generally ignored at non-school summer camps.
One notable exception to this foolish behavior is found in Michigan where the Michigan High School Athletic Association prohibits member schools’ student-athletes from using full equipment and participating in full-contact activities outside the high school football season. This is not a recent change; it’s been the MHSAA’s explicit policy for more than four decades.
And it’s a policy that has never been more in style and in favor than it is today.