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.
By The Book
January 16, 2018
The Michigan High School Athletic Association is unfairly criticized by the uninformed for inconsistently administering the Transfer Rule.
That some students are eligible and others not after a change of school enrollment is the result of 15 stated and necessary exceptions within the Transfer Rule that can cause some students to be immediately eligible while others have to wait about one semester before they become eligible to participate for their new school. The rule, as written, with 15 pretty cut-and-dried exceptions, is consistently applied.
Some students have their ineligibility extended from one semester to two because an athletic-motivated transfer was alleged by the student’s previous school and confirmed by the MHSAA, OR because one of the listed athletic-related links was found to be present by the MHSAA without any school needing to make a written allegation of an athletic-motivated transfer. Some students have their eligibility extended further – up to four years – because they transferred as a result of undue influence (athletic recruitment).
So, if you read that one student transferred without any loss of eligibility, and another transfer lost one semester of eligibility, and another lost two semesters of eligibility, and another student lost even more, it is a function of the specific rules involved and their application to the specific facts of the different students’ situations.
It’s not bias, but the book (the Handbook that all member schools adopted); it’s not favoritism but how the rule applies to the facts of each case.