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:
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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.
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We know that heading the ball in soccer is injurious, especially to younger athletes, and especially to females.
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We know that checking from behind is a cause of serious injury in ice hockey.
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We wonder if protective headgear has a place in soccer, or if protective head and face protection has a future role in softball.
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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 Essential AD
March 24, 2015
It’s the final week of the winter sports season.
If there is one time of the year when I hear it, and hear it again – that time is now when local school athletic administrators exhale deeply and admit they’re tired and need a break.
The winter season is long. Almost all the practices and contests are indoors, most sharing the same very limited spaces. Stormy weather wreaking havoc with schedules. Officials turning back games due to injury or fatigue.
Many of these administrators gathered last weekend at the annual conference of their professional organization, the Michigan Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association, which is the best of its kind in the country, unmatched in its commitment to professional development for athletic directors, regardless of their years of service.
It often impresses and inspires me to observe athletic directors, at the time of their greatest fatigue, coming together to be energized with each other’s company and educated by each other’s ideas to improve local programs.
As societal changes cause school competitions to become more complicated and controversial, the case for the full-time, well-trained athletic administrator becomes even more compelling. School districts that cut corners on this essential staff member find only that the resulting problems are worse – even more complicated and more controversial.
This professional administrator is the essential foundation of a safe and sensible program worthy of the name “educational athletics.”