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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.

More than Fun and Games

September 24, 2014

Five years ago there were many skeptics when the MHSAA redesigned its website and included twice-weekly blogs by the executive director and active Facebook and Twitter pages as well as YouTube channels, and gave constituents and critics alike an opportunity to post comments. Some skeptics said we were being distracted with frivolous fun and games, and others said all this interaction would be a persistent source of problems.
In fact, for the MHSAA, this constituent engagement has been about much more than fun and games and it’s been a means to solve problems.
Our primary use of social media and other means of constituent engagement has been to drive people to high school events and to the MHSAA website where the distinctive messages of educational athletics would stand out.
Rather than creating problems, allowing the crowd to enter scores on MHSAA.com has led us to post more accurate scores more rapidly than when we depended on school coaches or administrators alone.
More recently we have been reviewing our event emergency plans and our office business continuation plans, which had been developed before social media became a fact of life; and now we are revising those documents to make social media the primary means of communication during such problems.
It is entirely through social media, primarily Facebook and YouTube – that the MHSAA has caused people to be talking about sportsmanship and inciting larger, more positive student and adult spectator sections at high school contests. That’s our award-winning “Battle of the Fans” that moves into its fourth year in 2014-15.