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.”
The Power of the MIAAA
March 15, 2018
Athletic directors from all corners of Michigan are gathering this weekend for the annual conference of the Michigan Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association. This MIAAA might be the most powerful organization of its kind in the USA.
The MIAAA is powerful in its professionalism, in its commitment to ongoing professional training for its members.
Michigan has ranked consistently among the top states in the number of NIAAA Leadership Training Courses completed by interscholastic athletic administrators. The MIAAA attracts a higher percentage of its members to its annual conference than most states. And the MIAAA also conducts a smaller workshop for its members in late June and a leadership academy especially for newcomers to the profession early each August.
The MIAAA is powerful in its partnerships, most of all in its connections to the Michigan High School Athletic Association. Most of the MIAAA’s board meetings are in the MHSAA’s facility. The majority of the MHSAA’s Representative Council are MIAAA members. Many MHSAA staff participate in MIAAA programs, and many MIAAA members serve on MHSAA committees. There is a powerful synonymy as we pull in the same direction to serve school sports in Michigan.
This winter, as we watched a member school go off the rails over a transfer student’s eligibility, we were given a reminder of the power of professionalism and partnerships in the conduct of both personal and corporate affairs. While poison spewed from that school and two celebrity attorneys, the MHSAA kept a low profile and stayed on the high road. We worried less about defending ourselves and more about encouraging others to defend the policies and procedures they had adopted for school sports in Michigan. As usual, the MIAAA and many of its individual members led the effort.