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Guarding the Gate

February 24, 2012

More slowly than I would like, because it’s not a field in which I’ve had formal training or extensive practical experience, I’ve been learning about the world of startup companies and venture capitalists that discovered the sports world in the 1990s and have proliferated during the past decade.

Usually with their founder making the contact, many of these young companies have reached out to the MHSAA, hoping we will embrace and endorse or utilize their new product or service. Almost all owe their existence to the World Wide Web and to the passion of their founder, either for sports or for a concept they think solves some need of athletes, coaches or fans . . . or advertisers and sponsors.

And almost every one of these startups is looking for an exit; looking for a bigger fish to swallow them whole. And paying them handsomely for consuming the young guppy. A lucky few make what the industry calls the “Big Exit,” like a major network buying the startup for many millions of dollars.

We hear from many of these startups that the advertisers are clamoring for this or that they are promoting, but we usually see one of two things happen. Either the advertisers show so little interest that the startup fails, or what support the advertisers do provide goes to the venture capitalists and not to those providing the content.

As we screen the plethora of proposals to capitalize on high school sporting events in Michigan, we look for two kinds of assurances. First, that the suitor doesn’t have an exit strategy; and second, that the initiative will have direct benefit in terms of both money and message to those providing the content:  i.e., schools.

Most of the initiatives we screen will assist schools with neither money nor message, and some of them would actually provide a message that is contrary to the mission of educational athletics.

So we’re guarding the gate, in both directions – controlling the entrance to the high school sports market in Michigan, as well as the escape of those who are in our market for a fast buck and quick exit, big or small.

Not In School Sports

June 5, 2015

When those involved in high-profile major college sports offer advice to us in lower profile but perhaps higher principled school sports, we can quickly lose our patience.
Why, for example, would we ever listen to scheduling suggestions for high school basketball from the higher level that schedules games every day of the week, at any time of the week, anywhere on this continent or another?
These behaviors in major college basketball describe an athletic program that is orphaned from the academic mission of the colleges and universities to which they increasingly have become disconnected. We can’t let that happen to school sports.
Major college athletics is in an “arms war” of escalating costs for extravagant facilities and exorbitant coaches’ salaries. Blinded by their own ballooning budgets, college folks’ foolish suggestions for more frequent and distant high school games would increase the operational costs in the athletic departments of struggling and sometimes bankrupt school districts. We can’t let that happen in school sports.
Only when major college sports gets its house in much better order will any of its people earn the slightest right to suggest new policies and procedures for school sports. For now, much of what we see in high-profile college sports shows us what we should not do, not what we should do, in high school sports.