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Let Life Teach

December 7, 2012

Here’s a golden nugget from Ann Arbor’s Dr. Dan Saferstein’s little book, Win or Lose:  A Guide to Sports Parenting:

“Most of us have an easier time being math parents than we do being sports parents.  We don’t stand over our children as they’re doing their homework, hollering at them to round to the highest decimal or carry their zero.  We trust that they’ll be able to figure things out on their own, and if they can’t, they’ll get the help they need from their teachers or by asking us.

“What a lot of sports parents seem to forget is that young athletes also need the same space to figure things out on their own.  They need to learn how to think and make decisions during game situations, which isn’t easy to do when your parent (or someone else’s parent) is shouting out directions.

“The reality is that if your child could score a goal or stop a defender, he would.  In most cases, telling your child to move faster to the ball is like telling him to be taller.  Effort isn’t the only critical factor in sports, or in math.  Some children will never be high-level athletes no matter how hard they try, which is by no means a tragedy.  The world doesn’t necessarily need more gymnastics, softball or soccer stars.  It needs more young people who are willing to try and make our world a better place.”

Go to dansaferstein.com for more good stuff from the good doctor.

The Safe Play Game Plan

April 21, 2015

On Feb. 10, bills were introduced into both the United States Senate and United States House of Representatives, together called the “Safe Play Act,” which addresses three of the four health and safety “H’s” described in my last posting: Heat, Hearts and Heads.
For each of these topics, the federal legislation would mandate that the director of the Centers for Disease Control develop educational material and that each state disseminate that material.
For the heat and humidity management topic, the legislation states that schools will be required to adopt policies very much like the “MHSAA Model Policy to Manage Heat and Humidity” which the MHSAA adopted in March of 2013.
For both the heart and heat topics, schools will be required to have and to practice emergency action plans like we have been promoting in the past and will be distributing to schools this summer.
For the head section, the legislation would amend Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments and would eliminate federal funding to states and to schools which fail to educate their constituents or fail to support students who are recovering from concussions. This support would require multi-disciplinary concussion management teams that would include medical personnel, parents and others to provide academic accommodations for students recovering from concussions that are similar to the accommodations that are already required of schools for students with disabilities or handicaps.
This legislation would require return-to-play protocols similar to what we have in Michigan, and the legislation would also require reporting and record-keeping that is beyond what occurs in most places.
This proposed federal legislation demonstrates two things. First, that we have been on target in Michigan with our four Hs – it’s like they read our playbook of priorities before drafting this federal legislation.
This proposed federal legislation also demonstrates that we still have some work to do.