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Close Calls

November 22, 2011

The little slip of paper I removed from the fortune cookie read:  “Every important call is a close one.”  That notion may be more critically important in some aspects of life than others, but nowhere in the fun part of life is it any truer than competitive athletics.

Where the winning margin can be a fraction of a second or inch, observed by hundreds or even thousands of spectators, athletes, coaches and contest officials, we know this to be true:  the toughest decisions are the most critical, most defining of all.

School and school sports administrators learn that it is the closest calls – where evidence is least conclusive, opinions most divided or precedent lacking – that have the greatest effect on their school communities and their own careers.

It is at these times – close calls – that leaders show up.  That they speak up.  That they stand up.

The Safe Play Game Plan

April 21, 2015

On Feb. 10, bills were introduced into both the United States Senate and United States House of Representatives, together called the “Safe Play Act,” which addresses three of the four health and safety “H’s” described in my last posting: Heat, Hearts and Heads.
For each of these topics, the federal legislation would mandate that the director of the Centers for Disease Control develop educational material and that each state disseminate that material.
For the heat and humidity management topic, the legislation states that schools will be required to adopt policies very much like the “MHSAA Model Policy to Manage Heat and Humidity” which the MHSAA adopted in March of 2013.
For both the heart and heat topics, schools will be required to have and to practice emergency action plans like we have been promoting in the past and will be distributing to schools this summer.
For the head section, the legislation would amend Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments and would eliminate federal funding to states and to schools which fail to educate their constituents or fail to support students who are recovering from concussions. This support would require multi-disciplinary concussion management teams that would include medical personnel, parents and others to provide academic accommodations for students recovering from concussions that are similar to the accommodations that are already required of schools for students with disabilities or handicaps.
This legislation would require return-to-play protocols similar to what we have in Michigan, and the legislation would also require reporting and record-keeping that is beyond what occurs in most places.
This proposed federal legislation demonstrates two things. First, that we have been on target in Michigan with our four Hs – it’s like they read our playbook of priorities before drafting this federal legislation.
This proposed federal legislation also demonstrates that we still have some work to do.