![](/sites/default/files/imported/DirectorSig2H.jpg)
Championship Comments
April 23, 2013
Tom Lang wrote for the Lansing State Journal on April 5, 2013, about our most recent four-time MHSAA wrestling champion who, in keeping with our policy of not naming students in blogs, is not named here.
What really makes me want to name the Fowlerville senior heavyweight is that, in Lang’s article, the four-time champ freely names his practice partners over the years and credits them for his success.
With maturity and humility uncharacteristic of athletes twice his age, our newest of 17 four-time champs said: “I definitely had some great practice partners who were beating me up;” and he named five of them who he said “were all great practice partners for me. They were quicker so I had to make sure I stayed in good position and worked a lot on speed and more fluid technique.”
This senior, who pinned every opponent he faced this past season continued: “A lot of people might have been four-time state champs but they get one injury and that ruins it. Four years can be looked at as a very short time, but that’s a long time with wrestling and how you can face injury. There seems to be a lot of knee torqueing and shoulder injuries, the joints – and it really wears at you going four years in high school. It can be brutal on the body. So just staying healthy four years so you get a chance, is just the start.”
Giving credit to good partners and good luck. I’m thinking this young man already knows much more about life than wrestling.
![](/sites/default/files/imported/DirectorSig2H.jpg)
Fit to Fly
February 3, 2017
I suppose I’ve flown more than a half million miles on commercial or chartered aircraft. Nevertheless, it still amazes me to witness a large passenger jet lift off the earth and take to the sky.
Sometimes it has occurred to me that, with enough thrust, almost anything can be made to fly. Of course, the more aerodynamic the object, the less power is needed to send the object into the sky and keep it there.
The metaphor is obvious.
If there is enough force behind it, almost any idea can take flight. However, the best ideas take flight with little effort ... they have been fitted for the intended purpose and the environment ... while bad initiatives require extraordinary effort to get up and keep going.
This doesn't suggest that leaders should always take the path of least resistance. But it does mean leadership should count the costs. Is the amount of effort required to launch an initiative worth the collateral damage? Is the amount of energy required to maintain an initiative worth the results?
The image some people have of the current proposal to seed Boys and Girls District and Regional Basketball Tournaments is of an ungainly object being thrust into the air. It can be done, but should it be done? Will the result be worth it?
The proponents want the Michigan High School Athletic Association to adopt and modify a system used to seed the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament. That's a tournament limited to just 68 of 350 universities that sponsor Division I men's basketball programs. One person collects the scores of all the games involving those teams and enters the data to compute the strength of each team’s record and schedule.
But the MHSAA tournament involves 750 varsity teams for boys and nearly the same number of varsity teams for girls which together play approximately 27,500 games in a single season. There are often more than 350 high school varsity basketball games on a single evening. One person is NOT going to be physically able to collect all those scores and enter all that data. And the MHSAA would be foolish to think that it could be accomplished, and irresponsible to have the basketball tournament experience depend on such a scheme.
Well-intentioned people have unrealistic expectations about this. They don't appreciate the amount of resources the MHSAA would have to put into making this thing fly. We could do it by mandating that every school use the same schedule and score software and conditioning a school’s tournament participation on 100 percent compliance with score reporting.
But even if we launch it and apply even more force to keep it in the air, we have to wonder about the fairness and outcome of easing the path in the MHSAA Basketball Tournaments for teams which had the best regular-season records, at least up to some point before the end of that season when the number crunching would have to stop and pairings and sites would need to be announced.
Three of the four state high school associations that border Michigan have seeding for their high school basketball tournaments (basketball crazy Indiana does not). But those three state associations seed only the first round of the tournament, and those three use no fancy formula ... they have the coaches of the teams assigned by geography to the tournament site meet to separate the better teams in the earliest games.
If there is to be seeding in MHSAA Basketball Tournaments – and that’s a big if – our neighboring states’ approach is more practical and better fitted for an all-comers tournament at the high school level. That might fly, and stay in the air without excessive force.