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Community Development

April 1, 2015

When those who lead, manage and deliver school sports do their jobs well, the whole child – body, mind and spirit – is educated. Students learn to lead, and they learn to follow. They learn to become good team captains and good teammates.
When the job is done well, we place good sports on the path to becoming great citizens. We elevate both school spirit and GPAs. We lower dropout rates and discipline problems.
When the job is done well, school sports is an essential component of school improvement, as well as of the community building and place making strategies that every progressive city and town in Michigan is thinking about.
Successful schools are the ones in the center of community life; and when the job is well done, school sports programs are central to the life of those schools.
Building a school program without sports is like constructing the physical school building without the mortar that holds things together. Building a community without comprehensive schools is just as foolish.

Not Right for Us

March 7, 2017

The proposal to utilize KPI Rankings to seed the District and Regional rounds of the MHSAA Boys and Girls Basketball Tournaments should not be adopted by the Michigan High School Athletic Association.

This is no criticism of KPI Rankings per se, or of its creator who is assistant athletic director at Michigan State University; but it’s not the right thing to do for our statewide high school basketball tournaments.

The KPI rankings is one of a half-dozen means used by the NCAA to seed its Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament. But the proposal before us is that KPI rankings become the one and only system for seeding the MHSAA’s tournaments. There would be no other criteria and no human judgment.

The result would be seeding that misses important details, like which teams are hot and which are not at season end, and which teams have recently lost players to injuries or ineligibilities and which have had players return.

KPI ranks teams on a game-by-game basis by assigning a value to every game played. A loss to an opponent with a poor record is considered a “bad loss” and has a negative point value. A win over an opponent with a good record is considered a “good win” and earns a positive point value. Margin of victory is a factor.

This is a nice tool for the NCAA to use, along with a variety of other tools and considerations that its billion-dollar budget can accommodate, but none of which is proposed for seeding the MHSAA tournaments. KPI Rankings is not sufficient as the one-and-only seeding criterion for MHSAA tournaments.

Moreover, dependence on a seeding system owned by a single individual, who is outside the MHSAA office, and who has the potential to move from MSU to anywhere across the USA, is a poor business strategy.

If there is to be seeding, there are more appropriate ways to do it for the high school level. But first there needs to be clearer consensus that seeding is a good thing to do, philosophically and practically. In the MHSAA we do this sport by sport, and level by level. And the jury is still out for seeding in Michigan high school basketball.