The Curse of Cutting
July 22, 2016
The current cover story for the summer issue of a national magazine for coaches and athletic directors tries to make “The Case for Cuts.” The author, from a private school in New England, fails the task.
He argues, for example, that cutting kids can be beneficial because athletes who sit the bench build resentment and that “keeping kids can lose kids.” Not true for good coaches.
He flippantly says that other opportunities are available to kids who get cut. Not true in most places.
The calling of a coach in school-sponsored sports is not to make things easy for himself or herself and to make it hard for kids to find healthy peer groups. The calling of a coach of educational athletics is to reach, engage and motivate as many students as possible in learning life lessons and developing interests and skills for physical activity that will last a lifetime.
School sports is not “The Apprentice” where kids get fired for a poor tryout. School sports is more often a safety net to help young people get fired up for school and life.
Every student we can keep engaged in school sports is a future advocate for school sports, as are these student-athletes’ parents.
Every kid we cut, and his/her parents, will more likely become our critics. If the school sports program has no time for me, or for my son or daughter, then I’ll have no time for it – no time to attend events or volunteer, much less the inclination to donate funds or vote for tax increases.
Coaches who cut teams for their convenience today cut the connection with people who most want to be involved. As much as anything, this threatens the future of school-sponsored sports.
Occasionally, facility limitations may require great creativity or, as a last resort, cutting; but almost always for outdoor sports and generally for indoor sports, cutting is an avoidable curse – one that should be exorcised from educational athletics.
Sweating the Small Stuff - #2
June 1, 2018
Seeding of Michigan High School Athletic Association tournaments, especially basketball and ice hockey, is a topic that routinely finds its way to MHSAA Representative Council agendas.
In May of 2017, the Council rejected a comprehensive proposal to seed the District and Regional levels of MHSAA Basketball Tournaments; but the Council instructed MHSAA staff to examine ideas for limited seeding at the District level only, using an MHSAA-controlled system.
In May of 2017, it appeared there was a small number of Council members who supported the proposal submitted for that meeting by the Basketball Coaches Association of Michigan, and that there were two larger groups – one open to seeding on a more limited basis than BCAM proposed and another group opposed to seeding of any scope by any system.
MHSAA staff responded to the Council’s request by presenting in March of this year and again in May a plan for seeding only the top two teams of each District, to which teams would continue to be assigned by geographic proximity, and then placing top seeds on brackets that would assure those two teams could not meet until the District Finals.
The staff provided answers to the many obvious policy and practical questions, including the system to be used, the games to be included and the placement of teams on brackets.
The effort to arm the Council with these answers had the effect of turning some advocates into opponents of seeding. It was as if the more questions staff anticipated with answers, the more people objected to the plan.
This brought defeat to the plan to seed basketball Districts, and the same to plans to seed ice hockey Regionals and Semifinals.
The questions now are: Do we vote on a fully vetted plan, knowing the details before we move forward; or do we buy a pig in a poke, voting in a concept without details, surprising others and ourselves with how seeding would be implemented? And do we vote on anything at all until we have answered the large philosophical questions as well as the dozens of smaller practical questions that seeding requires we address.