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Consequences

September 28, 2012

In “the good ol’ days” order was kept, not just because people prayed in school or taught morality (if that’s possible), but because students understood there were consequences for breaking rules.  Practical consequences.  If you do this, that will happen.  Definitely.  And no fancy footwork by your folks or their lawyer would get you out of it.

It would have been unheard of for the parents of a boy or girl who was disciplined out of one school to petition the administration of another school to waive the transfer regulation to allow the youngster to participate in athletics immediately at that school, and then to engage an attorney and go to court when the second school performed its responsibility by saying “No, not for one semester.” 

This student could have learned a tremendous lesson for life:  you’ve got to live with the consequences for your actions. Instead, what the youngster learned was that if you don’t like the consequences of your actions, then sue.

I don’t think we do the MHSAA, schools, or – most importantly – our students any good if we keep bailing them out of the boat of consequences.

Stacking

December 19, 2014

Many in the interscholastic tennis community of this state have complained for years about the unethical practices of a small number of coaches who “stack” their lineups so that their better players compete in lower flights to increase their chances of success in advancing and earning points for their teams.
The current meet scoring system, which fails to reward teams for placing players at the highest levels, invites the problem. Appealing to personal integrity works with most coaches, but not all; so the issue of stacking festers, and it frustrates many coaches.
Hearing this pain, in 2009 the MHSAA convened a group of tennis coaches to discuss stacking. We utilized a paid professional facilitator. One obvious outcome was very little support to solve the problem by restructuring the tennis meet scoring system to disincentivize stacking.
The simple solution – to modify the meet scoring system to provide more team points for Number 1 singles than Number 2, and for Number 2 more than Number 3, etc. – was a double fault with the clear majority of the coaches assembled in 2009.
Of course, simple solutions rarely are so simple. And with this scoring system solution comes the likelihood that stronger teams move even further out of reach of their challengers. Other critics are uncomfortable with giving one student-athlete a higher potential team point value than another.
If those and other objections are the prevailing sentiment, then a new scoring system won’t be in our future. And stacking still will be.