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Default Setting

January 25, 2012

In the computer world we’ve become accustomed to the “default setting,” a place our computer returns without any intervention on our part.

It is not too long a leap to apply this metaphor to school-based sports. To suggest that with major college and professional sports programs crashing with scandals and strikes, the safe setting in the world of sports is interscholastic athletics.

With the absence of gaudy glitz and glamour, school-based sports has reduced possibilities for “operator error.”  It is almost as if school sports is fresh out of the box, pre-installed with policies and procedures that allow coaches and administrators to operate with a minimum of moves, motivations and messages.

I said during MHSAA Update Meetings last fall that our current theme is “cheap and simple” – that is, doing what we can to keep costs down and procedures simple during these days when school personnel have reduced resources, including time, to devote to school sports.  Increasingly, I see the challenge as providing the MHSAA membership fresh from the box services.  For example . . .

  • This was the primary motivation for the MHSAA moving to online rules meetings for coaches and officials that has saved them countless hours and miles to fulfill their meeting requirements in recent years.
  • This has been the primary motivation behind the digital broadcasting program by which member schools have a safe, reliable place for streaming school productions of both athletic and non-athletic events.
  • This is the primary motivation for the ArbiterGame electronic management tools being developed for member high school athletic departments fully integrated with MHSAA policies, systems and data.

In a world of increasing costs and complexities, ours is a difficult challenge to keep things cheap and simple in school sports; but we’ll be trying.

Medical Mystery

September 4, 2015

Each year in MHSAA member schools there are approximately 200,000 student-athletes who complete a pre-participation physical examination for which an MD, DO, Nurse Practitioner or Physician’s Assistant will sign a form certifying the fitness of the student for one or more interscholastic sports.

That massive number of physical exams will produce a minimal number of complaints – mostly from medical personnel – regarding the “burden” of MHSAA procedures. But if there is one group for whom I have little sympathy, it’s for these medical offices.

During the past half-year I have had personal appointments at a half-dozen different medical offices. On each occasion of a first visit, I was required to complete a half-dozen or more forms, including information regarding my medical history. I became increasingly unimpressed with the antiquated operations of our health care system. This is a mystery to me.

  • Why is it that I must answer the same questions at every medical office to which I’m referred? Why, for example, don’t the orthopedic specialist and the physical therapist receive electronically my medical history from my primary physician?

  • Why is it that my primary physician does not receive a complete record of my immunizations from the county health department or any one of several pharmacies that has given me shots?

  • Why is it necessary to rely on the memory of the patient? Why isn’t there a medical database for me, accessible with my permission to every health care provider I see?

I expect that within three years, the MHSAA will follow a handful of other state high school associations to promote (and some state associations may require) electronic pre-participation medical history/physical exam forms which will not require parents to complete entirely new medical histories each and every year their child participates in school sports. 

While we may follow a few states by a year or two, it appears we will precede the medical establishment by many years in modernizing procedures. This will tend to assure that student-athlete medical histories are more complete and accurate; it will be a greater convenience to both parents and medical providers; and it will promote greater participant health and safety.