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Second Half by MHSAA

Lift

November 11, 2011

Not too long ago there was a television commercial that depicted a huge jumbo jet taking off.  Then the pilot spoke about what it takes to lift such a large load off the ground.

The pilot said that to get such a huge weight off the ground you don’t go with the wind.  You go against it.  He said, “What pushes against us, lifts us up.”

There is no question that this is the recent story for the MHSAA which, momentarily in 2008, was knocked off balance by an adverse judgment by a federal court.  In many respects, the MHSAA is stronger – financially and in other ways – because of 2008.  The bad times made us better.

I’m hoping we will be able to say the same about local school sports generally a few years from now.  That these bad times made us better.  That today’s headwinds gave us the lift we needed to reach new and improved heights in school-based sports.

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.