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A Game Changer

July 9, 2012

In the year 2000, fewer than 300,000 books were published in the United States.  In 2010, more than a million were published.

This means that electronic media didn’t kill the book publishing industry, as some experts predicted.  Quite the opposite.  But electronic media surely changed the industry in several major ways, including:

  • It democricized the industry – made it cheaper and easier for almost all of us to publish whatever we want, whenever we want, even if only our family and closest friends might read it.

  • It dumbed down the industry.  With almost everybody able to produce almost anything, the average quality of published works has plummeted.

The importance of these book industry statistics to us is that they point to what can and does happen in other aspects of life, including school sports.  They provide evidence that sometimes what we think might crush us, only changes us.  Causes us to do things differently – cheaper, faster or better and, sometimes, all three at once.

Some of us in school sports may, sometimes, curse electronic media; but many of the changes they have brought us are positive.  Like officials registering online, receiving game assignments online and filing reports online.  Like schools rating officials online; and online rules meetings for coaches and officials.  Like schools scheduling games online, and spectators submitting scores online.  Like the ArbiterGame scheduling program the MHSAA is now providing all its member high schools free of charge.

Remarkable Student-Athletes

May 8, 2015

Every spring I have the privilege and pleasure of participating in several league or local school events that acknowledge and reward the careers of student-athletes who distinguished themselves as multiple-sport participants with very high academic grade point averages. One of those events this year was the 2015 Senior Athlete Recognition Ceremony of the Capital Area Activities Conference. It was remarkable in several ways.
It was my fourth time in attendance at the event, which started when the league was smaller and simply called the Capital Area Conference. I was the speaker at one of its first recognition ceremonies. In later years I attended as our first son, and then our second, were among the evening’s honorees. But I found the 2015 CAAC event remarkable in two other and more important ways.
First, as the Master of Ceremonies Tim Staudt read off the intended college majors of the 200 honorees (10 per school), I noticed that not one of the students had declared the intention of being an English major, which was my college major and to which I credit much of the pleasure I’ve enjoyed as a human being and the success I’ve experienced as an administrator of school sports. I’m hoping some of these 200 of the CAAC’s best and brightest – a truly impressive group – will decide or even just stumble into an English major – a place to learn how to think and to communicate.
The second remarkable feature of this remarkable group of 200 was that the number of boys almost equaled the number of girls. This almost never happens, and that has always concerned me – that boys settle for athletic achievement alone while girls strive to achieve in athletics, academics, activities and much more of what a comprehensive education has to offer.
It is extremely important to the future of our society that we demand much more of boys than we are getting. If we expect them to be productive in life and to be good citizens, husbands and fathers, boys need to learn in high school that “settling” is not sufficient and that a life which revolves around sports alone is a life that will be disappointing.