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It’s Change, Not Status

January 5, 2016

When I see a professional sports team install a scoreboard that is more expensive than the total of the interscholastic athletic budgets of the two dozen high schools closest to that stadium, I gripe.

When I see a half-dozen medical professionals scamper out to attend to an injured college football player, and then watch a local high school junior varsity soccer game where no medical professional is present, I grieve.

But in spite of these dispiriting moments, I never wish that my life’s work had been at those higher levels. Long ago I was impressed by the statement that we should measure impact by change, not by status.

It is at the school sports level, much more than at so-called higher levels, that lives are changed. No glitz. No glamour. Just huge results, with limited resources.

Stacking

December 19, 2014

Many in the interscholastic tennis community of this state have complained for years about the unethical practices of a small number of coaches who “stack” their lineups so that their better players compete in lower flights to increase their chances of success in advancing and earning points for their teams.
The current meet scoring system, which fails to reward teams for placing players at the highest levels, invites the problem. Appealing to personal integrity works with most coaches, but not all; so the issue of stacking festers, and it frustrates many coaches.
Hearing this pain, in 2009 the MHSAA convened a group of tennis coaches to discuss stacking. We utilized a paid professional facilitator. One obvious outcome was very little support to solve the problem by restructuring the tennis meet scoring system to disincentivize stacking.
The simple solution – to modify the meet scoring system to provide more team points for Number 1 singles than Number 2, and for Number 2 more than Number 3, etc. – was a double fault with the clear majority of the coaches assembled in 2009.
Of course, simple solutions rarely are so simple. And with this scoring system solution comes the likelihood that stronger teams move even further out of reach of their challengers. Other critics are uncomfortable with giving one student-athlete a higher potential team point value than another.
If those and other objections are the prevailing sentiment, then a new scoring system won’t be in our future. And stacking still will be.