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.
Tracking Transfers
August 16, 2016
The number of requests to waive rules by Michigan High School Athletic Association school administrators to the MHSAA Executive Committee during the 2015-16 school year dropped to the lowest total since the 2006-07 school year, and the percentage of approved requests exceeded 80 percent for the first time in decades.
Of 453 requests for waiver, 381 (84%) were approved during the Executive Committee’s 12 meetings from August 2015 through June 2016.
As always, requests to waive the transfer rule dominated. There were 291 requests, of which 224 were approved (77%). That’s the first time there were fewer than 300 transfer waiver requests since the 2006-07 school year.
Across the U.S., transfers persist as the most popular and prickly eligibility issue of school sports, especially in states with open enrollment/school of choice. While certainly a greater plague in more populated areas where several schools are often in close proximity, this problem knows no economic boundaries – students bounce from home to home in disadvantaged communities and wealthier parents leverage their advantages to buy homes where they desire their children to be schooled.
While still a very small percentage of all transfer students, high profile athletic-related transfers get headlines and, too often, their new teams grab trophies that elude schools which play by both the letter and the spirit of transfer rules.
Mishandling transfers is still the No. 1 cause of forfeitures in Michigan high school sports. Increasing mobility and the messiness of marital relations keep students on the move, and keep athletic administrators on their toes. Vetting all new students, and getting all information before the new student gets in a game, is a high priority of the full-time professional athletic administrator, and it’s not something many part-time ADs can do.