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Centennial Celebration

October 20, 2017

The National Federation of State High School Associations is preparing to celebrate its 100th year of service during the 2018-19 school year. It may be unfair to boil down to a few bullet points a century of contributions to school sports, but I make the attempt here – with the credentials that there has been a John E. Roberts heading up a National Federation member state organization for more than 60 of those years (my dad in Wisconsin for nearly 30 years, followed by my more than 31 years in Michigan).

Here, in my opinion, are the four greatest gifts of the National Federation to school sports in America:

  • In the late 1920s and 1930s, the National Federation’s leadership influenced the end of national high school tournaments. First four, then a dozen and then two dozen very young state high school associations, through their even younger National Federation, successfully challenged prestigious universities (like the University of Chicago) and the biggest names in college sports (like Amos Alonzo Stagg) who conducted national high school tournaments.

  • During the next decades, and one sport at a time, the National Federation assumed from the colleges and non-school organizations responsibility for writing the playing rules for high school level competition, intentionally crafting rules that promoted greater participant safety and much more ease of understanding and enforcement by contest officials. The National Federation now releases about 40 publications each year, serving 16 different sports.

  • At the start of the new millennium, the National Federation began its march to emerge as the nation’s most prolific provider of online education for coaches. The National Federation now has more than 50 different online courses available, including more than 20 free courses; and approximately five million courses have been delivered.

  • In 2013, the NFHS Network was launched to provide a digital broadcast home for state high school association tournaments and the School Broadcast Program. With more than 3,000 events produced each month now, this is the most effective platform in National Federation history for promoting the excitement, diversity and values of school-sponsored sports.

Sold Out

December 13, 2016

We are sometimes criticized for limiting the scope of school sports – for restricting long-distance travel and prohibiting national tournaments; but there is no question that we are doing the correct thing by protecting school sports from the excesses and abuses that characterize major college sports.

Across the spectrum of intercollegiate athletics, but especially in Division I football and basketball, there exists an insatiable “keep-up-with-the-Joneses” appetite.

Universities are building increasingly extravagant facilities. They are sending their “students” into increasingly expansive scheduling. But it’s never enough.

There is always another university somewhere building a bigger stadium, a fancier press box or more palatial dressing rooms, practice facilities and coaches quarters.

So-called “students” are sent across the US and beyond to play on any day at any time in order to generate revenue to keep feeding the beast.

The Big Ten knows it’s wrong, admits it, but schedules football games on Friday nights to attract larger rights fees from television.

Feeling used or abused, some of the athletes of Northwestern and then at the University of Wisconsin, talk of creating a union to protect themselves from the obvious, rampant exploitation.

And then occasionally, some college coaches dare to suggest that high schools are wrong to have regulations that reject the road that colleges have traveled, a road that has distanced athletics very far from academics in intercollegiate sports.

The intercollegiate model is not and must not be the interscholastic model. We who are sold out for educational athletics have nothing good to learn from those who have sold out for broadcast revenue.