Bottom Lines
May 19, 2017
The cost of everything in everyday life seems to rise every year. Everything, that is, except the bread and butter revenue source of the Michigan High School Athletic Association.
Next school year – 2017-18 – is the 14th straight year that ticket prices for the District level of MHSAA basketball and football tournaments have remained unchanged; and it’s the 15th consecutive year without increase at the Regional level of those tournaments. Five bucks.
Meanwhile, the cost of venues hosting some MHSAA championships is rising rapidly. Even if calendar conflicts were not evicting the MHSAA from Michigan State University’s Breslin Center, steeply increased expenses could have the same effect.
There was a time when universities across the U.S. wanted state high school association tournaments using their on-campus facilities. This was a public service as well as a marketing tool for those institutions.
Today these universities derive much more revenue from higher international student tuition than is paid by the in-state students who first come to the campus to play in or watch state high school championships. Even more important than tuition dollars are research grants, royalties and donations to what is now the big business of higher education.
Where campus athletic facilities are operated outside the athletic department it is even more evident that money trumps the mission of public service, at least as it relates to facility usage and secondary school athletic programs which, to be sure, are less important than the search for world peace and cancer cures by our universities.
People might believe it’s more appropriate for MHSAA events to be on college campuses than in commercial arenas; but frankly, it’s getting hard for us to see a difference. The bottom line drives them both.
Secret Weapon
October 25, 2016
The rapid rate of turnover in the ranks of local school sports leadership might suggest a program that is in disarray and has lost its way. But that’s not the case most of the time in most of our schools, which operate with a North Star sense of direction and regular recall of the core values of educational athletics. This is because school sports has a secret weapon.
In schools across this state there are coaches and administrators whose lifetime profession and passion has been school sports. People who chose to stick with sports when there were other opportunities in education with more regular, less demanding hours. People who chose to stay at the secondary school level when there were opportunities at higher levels. These folks are sold out for school sports, and they are the secret weapon of school sports.
For these people, school sports has been the life-affirming, life-shaping, sometimes even life-saving business of educational athletics.
For these people, school sports has been a calling, nearly a mission, not quite a crusade.
For these people, everything they do is connected, is intentional, is purposeful.
When these people conduct a coach or parent meeting, or a pep assembly or a postseason awards night, they know why they are doing so.
When these people coordinate homecoming week festivities or create their school’s student-athlete advisory council or its Hall of Fame, they know why they are doing so.
It’s because they know interscholastic athletic programs are good for students, schools and society in ways that other youth sports programs can’t come close to matching.
The why of their work guides them and drives them. It gives meaning and motivation to their days. It assures our success.