Up-Close Learning
November 18, 2014
Nearly 100 coaches gathered at the MHSAA office on Saturday, Nov. 1, for more than six hours of learning in Level 1 of the MHSAA Coaches Advancement Program. What occurred that day demonstrates the MHSAA’s commitment to a particular teaching and learning model we have chosen for its effectiveness, not its ease.
It would have been much simpler to put the 100 coaches in a single room and rotate three lecturers in front of them, and still simpler if everyone participated online in the isolation of their homes. But CAP is not delivered in either of those ways.
Rather, on Nov. 1, the nearly 100 coaches were placed in three separate rooms, so the presenters could see everyone’s eyes and read everyone’s faces and address everyone’s questions and concerns.
And, within those smaller rooms, the coaches sat in pods with four or five other coaches for more practical and often deeper discussion than the larger group setting allows.
Meanwhile, in an even more intimate fourth room, another 20 coaches completed the sixth and final level of the Coaches Advancement Program.
In an online world there is still a place for face-to-face teaching and learning. This is especially true in coaching where interpersonal relationships have more to do with determining success and failure than Xs and Os.
Crime and Punishment
August 17, 2012
In my previous posting I identified three criteria that have helped the MHSAA decide what its responsibilities should be, which is worth re-reading in the context of the widespread debate about what the NCAA’s role should be in the wake of the Penn State tragedy.
In essence, my last posting stated that the MHSAA has neither the legal authority nor the resources to be involved in protecting young people at all times and in all places. It is in the area of sports, and especially within the limits of the season and the boundaries of the field of play, that the MHSAA has a role and rules.
So obviously, if I had been asked about what the NCAA should do about Penn State, I would advise the NCAA to look at its Handbook. If its member institutions have adopted policies and procedures to be followed and prescribed penalties to be enforced that apply in this matter, then by all means, follow the rules. But if not, stay out of it. You’ve got enough to do that’s not getting done where you have the requisite expertise and responsibility.
Clearly, the NCAA leadership took a different position, apparently preferring to absorb criticism for going too far rather than suffer criticism that it did too little in response to horrific behavior at one of its member institutions.
Unfortunately, in stating publicly that the severity of the penalties was intended to send the important messages that football should not outsize academics and that success on the field should not be at the expense of the safety and nurturing of athletes and that coaches should not be treated as larger-than-life heroes, the NCAA misses the point that the system the NCAA itself has created or allowed is much at fault for such excesses.
Any system that allows such lavish expenditures on the sports program and its personalities the way it is allowed in NCAA Division 1 football and basketball will continue to have serious problems, every year and at multiple institutions. Penn State is not the first university to have screwed up priorities; it just has the most recent and tragic victims.
For its part, the MHSAA has rules designed to position athletics secondary to academics, keep the pursuit of success secondary to safety, and maintain administrators’ authority over coaches, whose pay may not exceed the supplementary pay schedule for teachers and may not flow from any source but the school itself. We are striving to have policies now that will make it unnecessary to impose penalties later for sports programs that are out of control.