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.
Seeking Input on Seeding
November 21, 2017
Seeding is a part of some levels of some Michigan High School Athletic Association tournaments, but no part of any level of MHSAA tournaments for other sports. The decisions are made sport-by-sport and level-by-level after sufficient understanding of a specific plan and broad support.
Seeding deals with logistics, not a fundamental value of educational athletics. It gets outsized attention for its importance, having nothing to do with the interactions that lead to learning and growing in interscholastic athletics. It’s another byproduct of the ever-increasing influence of the pervasively promoted and televised NCAA’s basketball tournaments over the past 25 years.
Michigan’s high school sport most engaged in the topic now is, in fact, basketball. Discussions and surveys have been conducted regarding seeding at MHSAA District tournaments.
We’ve learned this summer and fall that a majority of our local school athletic directors favor seeding and do not think it will make regular-season scheduling more difficult nor cause coaches to delay or diminish substituting during regular season games.
We’ve learned that a majority favor a system that maintains geographically determined District tournaments and merely separates the top two seeded teams in each District, and continues to use a blind draw to place other teams assigned to the District on the bracket.
We’ve learned that a majority favors having the best two teams determined primarily through objective criteria assessed by an MHSAA created or controlled ranking system.
We’ve learned that while the majority favors these moves toward District seeding, there are significant pockets of opposition to any seeding at all in MHSAA basketball tournaments. At two of six Athletic Director In-Service meetings and at two of seven Update meetings in September and October, large majorities in attendance opposed seeding of District basketball tournaments; and voters were nearly evenly split at several other meeting sites.
The discernible pattern is that seeding loses support as one moves out of the more densely populated areas of Michigan. We need to better understand why this is so, and what’s behind these regional or demographic preferences; then have the Representative Council make a decision at its meeting in March or May; and get this topic decided one way or the other.
There is so much else that is so much more important than seeding to the health of school-sponsored basketball that deserves the attention that seeding has been getting.