Limitations of Rules
November 15, 2013
Those who make rules ought to have knowledge of the limitations of rules, lest they overreach and over-regulate.
Dov Seidman writes in how: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything: “Rules fail because you cannot write a rule to contain every possible behavior in the vast spectrum of human conduct. There will always be gray areas, and therefore, given the right circumstances, opportunities, or outside pressures, some people might be motivated to circumvent them. When they do, our typical response is just to make more rules. Rules, then, become part of the problem.”
The NCAA is under constant criticism for its voluminous rule book which seems to pry into myriad of daily activities of athletes, coaches, boosters and others with so many rules it’s impossible for people to know them all. So university athletic departments must hire compliance officers to guide people – effectively absolving the people in the trenches from knowing the rules and committing to their adherence; and the NCAA office must hire investigations to sort through all the allegations of wrongdoing.
While much trimmer than the NCAA Manual, the MHSAA Handbook is much larger today than its original versions. Still, every year in December when the MHSAA staff conducts a series of meetings that kicks off a six-month process of reviewing theHandbook, there is a concerted effort to “make the rules better without making the rule book larger.”
We know that unless the rules address a specific problem and are written with clarity and enforced with certainty, rules do more harm than they do good. “This,” according to Seidman, “creates a downward spiral of rulemaking which causes lasting detriment to the trust we need to sustain society. With each successive failure of rules, our faith in the very ability of rules to govern human conduct decreases. Rules, the principal arm of the way we govern ourselves, lose their power, destroying our trust in both those who make them and the institutions they govern.”
Prep Prose
January 27, 2017
Mick McCabe retired in December after almost five full decades at the Detroit Free Press.
When Mick agreed with me, he did so boldly. When he disagreed, he sometimes did so brutally.
He was at his best, and did most for school sports in Michigan, when he told the stories of coaches and athletes in the cities, suburbs and small towns all across our state. Especially when he told the stories of those who would never coach or play a game beyond the high school level. Especially when he found and focused on an unknown person in a low-profile sport who raised our spirits by reminding us of how good educational athletics can be.
Mick may have written more words about high school sports in Michigan than any person ever. And that's saying a lot when one remembers Jack Moss and Bob Gross and Bob Becker and Jane Bos and Del Newell and Cindy Fairfield and a dozen other retired sports writers in our state whose substantial bodies of work promoted prep sports.
School sports usually has been well-served by such media professionals who were allowed by their industry to take the time necessary to know the people and the policies that served school sports, and were allowed the space to develop stories that went beyond headlines, tweets and texts, with fuller facts and closer truth than is the norm today.