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Little League Lessons

September 12, 2014

Little League Baseball turned 75 years of age this year, and the anniversary had shone a media spotlight on the organization even before a hard-throwing female pitcher stole the show at the Little League World Series last month.
Little League’s veteran CEO Steve Keener gave Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal (Aug. 4-10) the same words we’ve said often to ourselves about school-sponsored sports. He said:  “... our mission today is the same as it was 75 years ago. We just have to find different ways to tell the story ...”
One of Little League’s responses to this challenge parallels our own. In the words of Sports Business Journal, Little League “has turned its website into a vast resource” for league administrators’ tools, for coaches education and for parents.
Like school sports, Little League has different parents today than years ago. “For them, the youth sports fields aren’t so much a destination as a path;” and they need help navigating the pressures from instructors selling lessons, travel leagues promising exposure to college recruiters and professional scouts, and coaches of other sports who threaten that without year-round specialization, the “next level” will be beyond their child’s reach.
Like school sports, Little League still preaches the benefits and encourages multi-sport participation; but Little League has succumbed to pressure and now offers a fall program in addition to its late spring and summer program. Keener explained to Sports Business Journal: “... leagues were going to offer a program in the fall with Little League or without it, so he’d prefer they be subject to the same oversight as they are in the traditional season. ‘We offer it because we can’t stop it,’ Keener said. ‘We can’t make it go away. So we have to live with it and manage it.’ ”
We have often talked about taking a similar approach to summer basketball, 7-on-7 football and other programming that is currently outside the quality control that some school administrators and coaches think is needed.

Hard Copy

January 31, 2017

It's probably a sign of my age and stage in life, but I cannot get in any habit of consuming information by podcasts. If I want to absorb facts, figures and ideas that I can retain for later use, I have to receive that information in writing and be free to highlight phrases and make notes in the margins of that document.

I'm so committed to or conditioned by this process that I even need to print online articles so I can take my pen to the text to help me embrace the author's message or mold it into mine. I remain an ardent advocate for the medium of printed words.

I'm apt to remember portions of long-form printed pieces much longer than texts and tweets; and if a printed piece is very good, or at least speaks to me, I develop a relationship with it through my underlining and notes, and it stays with me longer than audio and even video media.

My preferences are demonstrated in the continuing commitment the Michigan High School Athletic Association has made to providing printed souvenir programs at the finals for most of its postseason tournaments as well as to a glossy, issues-oriented magazine (benchmarks) and hard-copy printed curriculum for our in-person coaches education program (CAP) when many of its counterpart organizations across the US have moved to electronic alternatives for these services.

I'm all for reducing the use and waste of paper for environmental reasons; but for educational purposes, print on paper still has a place in the modern world of communications clutter. Perhaps a never more important place.