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.
Football’s Future
March 20, 2012
Many folks, including me, will too often focus on the destination more than the trip. More on results than process. The end more than the means.
This is epidemic in sports, on all levels. There’s so much focus on the postseason that it overshadows the regular season.
In contrast, in educational athletics, we are supposed to hold to the principle that opportunities for teaching and learning are as plentiful, maybe more so, in regular season as in tournaments, at subvarsity levels as at varsity, during practices as during games.
This disease affects football as much as any high school sport. There’s been too much focus on the end of the season – playoffs. Postseason tournaments have been the demise of many great Thanksgiving Day high school football classics across the country. Playoffs continue to ruin rivalries and collapse conferences nationwide.
And, disturbingly, the focus on the end of the season misses what is most wrong with football, and may be most threatening to its future. It’s practice. Specifically, what’s allowed during preseason practice and then at practice throughout the season.
We can predict that, in high school football’s future, two-a-day practices will be fewer, practice hours will be shorter and activities will be different. Among proposals we will be presented (and should seriously consider) will be:
If this all sounds silly or radical, remember that the NCAA and NFL are already making such changes. NFL players face contact in practice on only 14 days during a 17-week regular season. Meanwhile, many high school coaches have kids knocking heads and bruising bodies two to four days a week, all season long. Giving critics the impression that interscholastic football for teens is more brutal than the higher levels of football for grown men. Inviting interference from people who think they know better.
Actually, we know better; and we need to do better. Soon.