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Bubble Wrap

October 28, 2014

We must do everything we can do to minimize serious injuries in school sports; but because the benefits of school sports participation are so universal and serious injuries so unusual, we should accompany our continuing campaigns for safety with constant appeals for common sense.

It is a compliment to school sports that each and every one of the very rare number of school sports-related deaths carries with it great sorrow and scrutiny. Nationwide there are so few tragedies that schools treat all of them with tenderness; and we try to learn from each of them how to have fewer of them.

But the attention we give to increased safety should not outshout the safety record we already have in school sports, especially compared to activities that lead to far more deaths with far less attention. For example, each year . . .

  • 20 skateboarding deaths;
  • 40 skiing deaths;
  • 400 youth drownings; and
  • 700 bicycling deaths.

Compared to school sports, these numbers are epidemics; and compared to school sports, these epidemics are ignored.

Our world is not bubble wrapped, nor should it be. School sports is not 100 percent injury-free, nor can it be. We should work to make school sports still safer, and work almost as hard to explain how safe school sports already is.

Large Topics for the Lower Level

December 22, 2017

Editor's Note: This blog originally was posted May 21, 2013, and the topic continues to be of prime concern today.

Sometimes our meeting agendas give the impression that junior high/middle school programs are unimportant or an afterthought; but that was not the case during the MHSAA Representative Council meeting May 5 and 6, and it will not be the case at many meetings throughout the next 12 months at least.

Here are just two of the tough multi-faceted topics that the Representative Council has asked to be addressed at constituent meetings from now through next February and will be studied by the MHSAA Junior High/Middle School Committee, Classification Committee and many of the MHSAA’s separate sport committees:

  • Are current season limitations for contests and limitations on the lengths of contests appropriate for the junior high/middle school level? Do the current limits reflect the correct philosophy for sports at this level? Do they accommodate the four-season approach many schools encourage? Do the limits drive some students to non-school programs? Do they cause some schools to not join the MHSAA?

  • Should the MHSAA provide rules, programs and services for 6th-graders who, in nearly 80 percent of situations, are located in the same buildings with 7th and 8th-graders? Does the MHSAA’s lack of involvement encourage the same by schools, and allow non-school programs to fill the resulting void; and does this drive those students away from school-based sports permanently? Or would the MHSAA’s involvement at this level pressure school districts to add sixth grade programs and services at a time of dwindling resources for the 7-12 grade program?

    • to benefit both kids and their schools at the junior high/middle school level as at the high school. Our agendas for the

We have always maintained that there is at least as much potential for school-based sports next year will have that belief as its foundation as these tough topics get the time they deserve.