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Deepening Appreciation

May 15, 2012

The first phase of ArbiterGame launches May 23.

The creation of these electronic athletic department administrative tools, tailor-made for Michigan high schools and fully integrated with MHSAA policies and procedures, is bridging most of whatever remaining gap that may exist in the MHSAA leadership’s understanding of and appreciation for the job of its member school athletic administrators and their support staff.

The MHSAA is in partnership with ArbiterSports to create the tools; and at each step of design and deployment, MHSAA staff are consulting with local athletic directors.  MHSAA staff have been engaged in training to help answer user questions from athletic administrators and secretaries.  There have been more hours than we can count when our staff has listened to athletic administrators talk about details of their tasks, and even more hours when our staff has talked about how we best respond to even the smallest details.

The process is helping MHSAA staff appreciate the long list of duties required for every athletic event for every level of every sport.  Never before have MHSAA staff talked so much about local scheduling of practices, games, facilities, transportation, workers and officials.  Never have we had a deeper and broader appreciation for all that is required – day after day, week after week, season after season.

As we develop administrative tools to ease the local school administrative burden, we deepen our understanding of the work in which local administrators are engaged.  We started this project to respond to athletic directors’ urgent requests to solve the problems of inadequate scheduling products and related support services from commercial vendors.  An unanticipated benefit has been to enhance our knowledge of their daily duties.  And we will be much better for it.

Suspicious Solutions

January 17, 2017

Fifty-two weeks ago yesterday I had hip replacement surgery on my right side. My recovery was so speedy that most people outside the offices of the Michigan High School Athletic Association never noticed, and I was back to my normal activities and workouts very quickly.

But gradually during late summer and then dramatically in early November, my body reacted. It has been giving me pain from hip to foot on my left side, a limp I can’t disguise, and a metaphor for this message.

It appears that correcting one thing adversely affected another thing; and the second problem is much more painful than the first one was.

So-called solutions often have unintended consequences, worse than the original problem. For example:

  • Every expansion of the MHSAA Football Playoffs has had an effect opposite of what was intended. Each has added additional stress on local scheduling and league affiliations; and each expansion has increased the likelihood of repeat champions.

  • Seeding MHSAA Basketball Tournaments, seen by some people as a solution so that the best teams will square off later in the tournament trail, will have those same consequences – stress on scheduling and leagues, and more repeat champions.

  • Relaxing requirements for cooperative programs once seemed like a good thing, but now it is more frequent that schools take the easy route – sending their students off to play on another school’s team – rather than doing the hard thing – providing and promoting the sport themselves. The former provides far fewer participation opportunities than the latter – the opposite of the intended purpose for cooperative programs.

  • Charter schools and School of Choice policies were supposed to force schools to improve through competition, but this “solution” devastated neighborhood schools. These policies didn’t “empower” parents, they created estrangement between schools and communities.

I could go on. The point is, my limp is a reminder to be on the lookout for the new problems inherent in so-called solutions.