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The Investment

February 3, 2015

Last month, Steve Christilaw who writes for the Spokane (WA) Spokesman-Review, ended an opinion piece with these statements:
“. . . a strong, vibrant society invests in its future by investing in young people. What our youth can learn from playing sports are life lessons we, as a society, place at a high value.

“How we pay for it all – education, the arts and athletics – has become a political football . . . and it deserves to be treated as the serious and significant investment that it truly is.”
Previous to that conclusion, Christilaw opined from his experience that the values of participation in school-sponsored sports are different than what young people gain in non-school club teams where the focus is more often on one’s self than cooperating with a team and representing a school or entire community.
There are those, of course, who see athletics as a distraction from the educational mission of academic institutions. I don’t doubt that can be the case in some places on some occasions; and I know from experience that leadership must be vigilant to keep a lid on the program and resist those who wish to take school sports to extremes.
But athletic programs which are true to the mission of supporting the educational mission of schools are far more the rule than the exception, most often operating at small fractions of the school budget, and most often involving large majorities of the student body.
A “serious and significant investment” indeed.

Coach Connection

April 21, 2017

It has been a record-setting year for the Coaches Advancement Program (CAP) of the Michigan High School Athletic Association, the interactive and face-to-face, eight-level coaches education program which the MHSAA delivers “anytime, anywhere” across the state and in conjunction with several Michigan colleges and universities.

With 20 more sessions still to occur, attendance has already exceeded the previous high of 2,055 course completions in 2013-14. By the end of this school year, individuals will have completed more than 25,000 CAP units since the 2004-05 school year.

MHSAA Assistant Director Kathy Westdorp is the energy behind this program. She’s an educator at heart and she lights up when welcoming coaches to CAP sessions. A growing cadre of presenters deliver CAP under her watchful eye.

It could have been easier had the MHSAA outsourced coaches education to an online provider; but too much would have been missed. Newer coaches would not have benefited from connecting with more seasoned coaches during group discussions; and the MHSAA would have missed this week-after-week connection with coaches of all sports in all parts of Michigan.

The thousands of dollars and hours that the MHSAA devotes to CAP demonstrates this organization’s belief that nothing – absolutely nothing – is more important in the process of educational athletics than the quality of the coach-athlete connection.