Disappointing Seasons
June 24, 2013
It is appropriate to take the longest day of the year to address one of the long tails of the longest lawsuit in MHSAA history.
In August of 2002, a US District Court gave Upper Peninsula schools three choices for remediating gender discrimination in their sports seasons. They were told to switch seasons for girls volleyball and basketball and do one of three additional things:
1. Place boys and girls in the same season in all sports; or
2. Place UP seasons at the same time as Lower Peninsula seasons in all sports; or
3. Switch UP boys and girls seasons in either soccer or tennis.
For a host of reasons in this state and all others, it has made good sense for many sports to schedule boys and girls in different seasons; and for very many years for many good reasons, UP schools have scheduled their seasons differently than LP schools in several sports. So options 1 and 2 were non-starters.
As for the third option: after girls volleyball and girls basketball, the sport for which UP schools least wanted to have switched seasons was tennis. So soccer was the UP sport selected for the court-approved switched seasons for boys and girls.
In July of 2007, the Federal Court denied a Motion by Intervenors to extract UP soccer from its earlier Order so that UP soccer would not be forced to switch seasons for boys and girls. At the same time in a separate Order, the Federal Court denied a Motion to extract LP tennis from the earlier Order.
The LP tennis community was and is as unhappy with the Federal Court Order as the UP soccer community. In fact, LP tennis has had the greatest participation loss of all sports since the seasons changes, including an almost 23 percent decline in boys tennis participation. Almost one-quarter fewer boys are playing high school tennis today than before the seasons switched in the LP!
In any event, the Federal Court determined in 2007 that the switching of boys and girls seasons in LP tennis and UP soccer was legal (after all, the Court itself had offered the changes as acceptable options in 2002); and the Court said that the MHSAA had gone to extremes to explain all the options to schools and listen to their opinions.
Demonstrating their characteristic independence, UP schools have not switched their boys and girls soccer seasons; and some now want the MHSAA to make an exception so they can play in the MHSAA’s fall boys tournament and spring girls tournament. But unlike those schools, which are not specifically addressed in the Federal Court Order, the MHSAA is subject to that Order and cannot make exceptions or grant waivers without violating the Court’s Order.
Based on the rationale of the 2007 Court Order, there is only a slim chance the Federal Court would ever modify its Order. The best chance will occur when there is a Motion filed jointly by the original parties to the lawsuit. It must address both genders, not just girls. It must be a permanent solution, not a temporary exception. It must require no other sport season be changed, for that would just upset another sport community and derail this effort.
Seeding Questions
April 6, 2015
The more I hear people speak with absolute certainty that seeding MHSAA tournaments would be a good thing for more sports to implement, the less I’m certain that adequate wisdom accompanies those words. And I’m particularly concerned with the condescending attitude of the advocates toward those who question if seeding is practical or fair for MHSAA tournaments.
Before seeding is adopted for additional MHSAA tournaments (and it appears ice hockey is on the fastest track), there are many practical questions to address for each sport, including who decides, how they decide and when they decide. Seeding in school sports is a much more difficult task than it is at higher levels where there are many fewer teams operating in much less diverse settings.
Any successful proposal for seeding in school sports must be able to give an informed “No” to these questions:
- Will the plan cause the “rich to get richer,” the successful to be even more successful?
- Will the plan add fuel to the public vs. nonpublic school discord?
- Will the plan create additional travel expenses for schools and loss of classroom instructional time for students?
Furthermore, any successful seeding plan must also provide an informed “Yes” to these questions:
- Will the plan promote the tournament among schools, media and the public?
- Will the plan increase tournament attendance?
And it is of most importance that every advocate of seeding acknowledge that opponents of seeding pose the right questions when they ask:
- Is it fair and is it right to ease the tournament trail for teams based on their regular season performance?
- Is a brand new start in the postseason bad, and if so, by what educational criteria?
When people boast that “the seeds held” in the NCAA basketball tournament or in our own MHSAA Tennis Tournament, we have to admit that this is exactly what ought to have happened when we gave the top seeds the easiest road to the trophy.
It is not wrong to question if that’s the right thing to do.