Growth Industry
December 26, 2014
We have wondered why Michigan’s high schools would enroll more J-1 visa students than in any other state, as well as more J-1 and F-1 visa students combined than the schools of any other state. It certainly can’t be our weather!
Like schools in many states, Michigan schools are looking to foreign countries to fill classrooms where enrollments have been falling, and they are looking to the tuition dollars of international students to help fill the hole of declining state funding.
And schools across the US are finding a hungry market, especially in Asia where families are willing to pay almost any amount to give their children the kind of educational opportunities their own countries don’t, including a leg up in gaining admission to a US college or university.
One unique contributing factor to our state’s leading totals is the late date when public school classes start in the fall. International students who miss the start of school in states which begin classes two, three or four weeks before Michigan can still try for a placement in Michigan where public high schools cannot begin classes until after Labor Day.
These late, scrambling and sometimes inadequately vetted enrollments are one of the many problems attendant to the increasing numbers of J-1 and F-1 visa students enrolling in Michigan each year. More serious are the “pipelines” that, for example, direct basketball players to some schools and ice hockey players to other schools.
It makes some people feel warm and fuzzy, but a lot more people get hot under the collar, to observe a foreign exchange student become a suddenly successful basketball team’s high scorer and rebounder, and then later be given a Division I university basketball scholarship. Or be the leading scorer on an ice hockey team that posts its best record and deepest MHSAA tournament run in the school’s history.
My wife and I have hosted an international college level student in our home for almost two years. I know the benefits to both parties. And I also know that there is a growing number of problems related to sports and profit that need to be stopped, or at least sent to some other state.
The Past, Present and Future of Golf
June 19, 2018
The game of golf can and does reveal both the good and bad sides of people. Think you might want to hire a person for a job? Then take that person golfing. Observe. If that person can’t count all his or her strokes on a golf course, you can’t count on that person in life.
Golf claims to need and nurture integrity like no other sport. It does not prescribe or require a contest official to observe every action but is designed to be a game where each competitor plays the ball as it is found and counts every attempt to hit it. The rules of golf are without leniency for a player who records an incorrect score yet depend on that player, and no one else, to count all strokes and assess any penalties that add to the score.
As a youngster, I played regularly with my parents. My mother was the club rules chairperson for many years. I was told in no uncertain terms to “play my ball as it lies and tell no lies about my play.”
Golf certainly has its detractors ... for example, its pace is slow and its price is high. But over years, and with enlightenment that arrived too slowly, golf has addressed its worst blind spots and opened its choicest courses and its most chauvinistic hearts to females and minorities. Its recent outreach to youth is marvelous; its ongoing support of charities is magnificent.
A recent controversy over scores posted by a small group of players at a Michigan High School Athletic Association Regional Golf Tournament has caused some local tarnish on this illustrious worldwide game and brought embarrassment to some players and their schools as well as some criticism of the MHSAA. It was alleged that players from more than one team who were assigned to the same competitive groupings colluded to post lower scores than they actually earned. Neither their coaches nor administrators discovered a crack in the players’ stories, or in their solidarity, in spite of repeated questioning. There was no evidence of acts of cheating, but a suspicious anomaly in the players’ scores caused concern at the Regional meet and since.
If there was a conspiracy of cheating, it was the players who are at fault, which must be shared by the adults in their lives who may have been unable to nurture character to the same degree they developed skills.
If the only solution to questions of players’ shaving strokes is adult supervision of every grouping at every Regional of all four Divisions, then the soul of the game and much of what it is supposed to teach is lost, and the time spent on the sport may be unjustifiable. At least that’s what our state golf coaches association argued a decade ago when coaches were granted relief from being assigned to accompany groupings and “observe” players. They said they wanted to coach their own kids and not be required to count the strokes of other players.
Studies in other states have demonstrated that golf is the school sport which, on a per-participant basis, causes students to lose more classroom instructional time than any other sport. It’s played off school grounds and very often with non-faculty coaches. It generates no revenue to offset expenses. Add in dissatisfaction with the court-ordered change of seasons for MHSAA Lower Peninsula golf tournaments 10 years ago — and this recent ugly and, for some, unsettled incident — and one is left with more reasons than not for the MHSAA to discontinue tournament sponsorship of golf.
But I love the sport! I grew up playing golf with my parents and spent hundreds more hours with them than my siblings who did not play the game. I had a few great rounds when I was a youngster and eventually settled on the goal of being among the 10 percent of all golfers who break 90. I love the colors and contours of challenging courses, which in my prime I preferred to play at their full length, from the toughest tees and with no “gimmies” on the greens. I now watch more golf on television than any other sport.
I’ve been thinking a lot about golf over the past decade, but have found little traction when talking about changing traditions of high school golf in Michigan ... for example, in favor of a Ryder Cup style team tournament — perhaps even coed — conducted in both Spring and Fall where schools (or their leagues) choose the season that fits their needs best. While the NCAA still conducts a Spring championship, it has “modernized” its tournament with match play, and television ratings reveal broader public appeal for the team format that professional players seem to relish. Might we make some changes to modernize high school competition in this state?
This tradition-soaked sport needs to be energized, not eliminated at the high school level. Most of all, it needs to be introduced earlier in rural and urban junior high/middle schools to create the interest and cultivate the skill that will lead to larger and more stable high school golf programs.