Logo
Second Half by MHSAA

Is a Future Possible?

September 8, 2011

While interviewing candidates for a staff position, we posed the question:  “What will school sports look like a generation from now?”  And we followed up with:  “What will the MHSAA need to do to be of relevant service in that future?”

In a follow-up interview with one of the leading candidates, when I invited questions, that candidate turned the tables and asked me what I thought school sports and the MHSAA would look like in 10 or 20 years.

These exchanges, and all that has been changing as school districts chop away at school budgets and programs, has me wondering if a future is possible for school sports.  But the answer is almost certainly “Yes.” 

School sports have survived two World Wars, the Korean War and Vietnam, as well as the Great Depression and multiple recessions.  School sports has existed before and after interstates and the Internet, before and after suburban sprawl and space exploration, before and after television and Twitter, before and after . . . well, you get the point.

Will school sports change?  Certainly.  But if history is a good indicator, it will change more slowly than the society around it.  And many people will cherish that gap.

A Solutions Approach

July 13, 2015

I had not been to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city, and I expected to see much change since my several visits before the flooding. What I discovered when I attended national meetings there recently was little change ... including most of the same sights, sounds and smells of years before. I expected the same of the national meetings ... “same-ol’ same-ol’.”
It has become tradition that the executive directors of the 50 statewide high school athletic associations meet twice during the annual summer meeting of the National Federation of State High School Associations in sessions separate from all other delegates to that large convention. It has also been customary for me to leave those sessions depressed as problem was heaped upon problem by the directors, with little attention to solutions.
However, between the two sessions this year, a small group of the executive directors talked about strategies to redirect the conversation; and the result of the second session in New Orleans was to develop a strategy for identifying and prioritizing the most significant problems of school-based sports, and then identifying and prioritizing the resources and alliances currently available, as well as those that could be developed through cooperative effort and strategic partnerships, to attack the most pressing problems.
The expertise to solve such problems has been in our room for years. What has been lacking is the commitment to a process that could move us from a group accomplished in citing problems and suggesting reasons for them to a group accomplished in working together to solve the most significant problems.
So, the “Big Easy” is and may remain pretty much as it always has been. But maybe future meetings of the National Federation, wherever they may be, will be undergoing substantive change.