Dangerous Plays
February 26, 2013
The MHSAA’s fourth health and safety thrust for the next four years focuses on competition rules. It intends to locate the most dangerous plays in each sport and to try to reduce their frequency. For example:
-
We know that kickoff returns, punt returns and interception returns – plays in the open field with a change in direction – are the most dangerous football game situations.
-
We know that heading the ball in soccer is injurious, especially to younger athletes, and especially to females.
-
We know that checking from behind is a cause of serious injury in ice hockey.
-
We wonder if protective headgear has a place in soccer, or if protective head and face protection has a future role in softball.
-
We know that ACL injuries in female basketball players and volleyball players is near epidemic and wonder if there is equipment or conditioning that can be mandated or recommended to save our players from what are serious and sometimes career-ending injuries.
We can make changes ourselves – through MHSAA sport committees – for the subvarsity level, but our committees can only make recommendations to national rules committees for varsity level play. Over the next four years, we will be asking our sport committees to give more time to the most dangerous plays in their sport – identifying what they are and proposing how to reduce that danger.
The Usual Suspects
December 30, 2016
It is difficult to find a year when the 11-player Football Finals of the Michigan High School Athletic Association involved more teams from southeast Michigan than appeared at Ford Field in 2016. In fact, just two counties (Oakland and Wayne) produced seven finalists. But then two counties on Michigan’s west side (Kent and Muskegon) supplied four of the 16 finalists.
Four of Michigan’s 83 counties producing 11 of 16 finalists in the 11-player championship games doesn’t’ feel like a statewide event; but one team from the Upper Peninsula, another from the Leelanau Peninsula in the northwest portion of the Lower Peninsula, and a team located along the Michigan/Ohio border remind us how large and diverse our state really is.
The 2016 MHSAA 11-player Football Finals consisted of many of the “usual suspects,” including two teams pursuing their fourth straight titles and one team seeking its third consecutive championship. Four of the eight 11-player champions from 2015 returned in the attempt to defend their titles in 2016, and two of the runners-up in 2015 were back to try to reverse their fortunes from 12 months earlier.
What is being demonstrated here in Michigan high school football is the trend seen in many other states. That is, as the number of classes or divisions of tournaments expands, the more often you see the same teams in the final rounds.
The surest way to have the “usual suspects” on championship day is to put them in tournaments with fewer schools. And of all MHSAA tournaments, the football playoffs have the most divisions with the fewest schools in each. The result is predictable.
This is a cautionary tale for those who desire that the number of classifications and divisions be expanded in MHSAA tournaments for other sports.
Meanwhile, we are keeping an eye on the tournament format in a neighboring state that places schools into divisions for larger schools after they are too successful over consecutive years in the classification that fits their enrollment. Those in Michigan who have been assigned to review such policies have complained that such “success factors” penalize future students because of the achievements of previous students and/or because such factors do nothing about “chronic success” by schools in the largest classification.