Lost Leaders
April 12, 2016
What’s the greatest threat to the future of school sports? It’s not concussions, for school sports are actually more safe each year, not less. It’s not a lack of civility, for our events are still the most sportsmanlike of any highly competitive sports program. It’s not cost, for school sports remain the cheapest form of organized sports to play and to watch.
Actually, the greatest threat to the future of school sports is from the self-inflicted wounds by local school district boards of education. The decisions to devalue the local high school athletic administrator. Heaping more and more duties on a person who is being given less and less time, training and support to perform those duties.
The full-time athletic administrator, with support for clerical duties and event supervision and without many other duties added on, is an increasingly rare situation in schools today. And when that person retires, moves up or otherwise moves on, it is typical that the replacement is less experienced, given even more unrelated duties to perform, and given less time in which to do them.
It’s then that the athletic director looks to coaches to run their own programs; and when the school coach is a nonfaculty person, this is a delegation of school sports to a non-school person.
Is it any wonder then that philosophies suffer, policies are ignored and problems occur?
Is it any wonder then that people who see no difference between the philosophies of school and non-school sports question why schools should spend any time at all on this aspect of adolescent development? They become all too ready to leave sports to the community.
Every shortcut to school sports administration has a consequence. Every dollar we try to squeeze from the school sports budget has a hidden higher cost. Every non-athletic duty we add to the athletic director’s day is another step closer to schools without sports.
And the secondary schools admired by the rest of the world will become ordinary.
Perspective
July 9, 2018
(This blog first appeared on MHSAA.com November 2, 2010)
Each summer I put together a list of all the problems we’re addressing and all the projects we know we’ll be working on through the MHSAA during the year ahead. It’s always a long list, and accomplishing just a few items would make any year a good year.
So, this requires that we try to decide between all that we might do and all that we must do. And here’s a reminder of one thing we must do.
When I ask school and community groups with whom I’m speaking about what they think the problems are in school sports, the most popular responses from these constituents are (1) too little funding, and (2) too many misdirected parents; or sometimes that order is reversed: over-involved parents and under-funded programs.
I like to caution people that in some situations, our students suffer from too little adult engagement in their lives and that, almost everywhere, interscholastic athletics benefit greatly from the time and energy parents and other adults volunteer to help local programs operate. But I get the point of what I’m hearing.
These and other responses I hear – serious as these cited problems can be – may merely be symptoms of the single, fundamental issue that’s at the heart of all the others. That’s perspective.
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Too little money for schools and sports?
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Pressure-packed parents?
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Poor sportsmanship?
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Too much specialization? Too much year-round competition?
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Too much talk of college athletic scholarships?
Perspective – spending money on less essential things.
Perspective – people focusing on adults’ desires more than students’ needs.
Perspective – forgetting or never learning the pure purpose of educational athletics.
Perspective again.
Perspective once again.
In essence, almost all issues arise from matters of perspective. At their root, almost all problems are problems of perspective.
What can we do about this?
I don’t have the perfect prescription; but one thing is certain: we can’t relegate this to an afterthought. We cannot hope to make time to address this problem each day; we must plan to make time for it each day.
We need to model a positive perspective. Point to it when we see it. Explain it. Reward it.
It can’t be left to others. We are the guardians of proper perspective. It’s Job 1.