Logo

Making an Impact

September 11, 2012

Here’s a provocative statement by David Gergen, professor of public policy and director of the Center for Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and a frequent political analyst for CNN:  “The nonprofits making the greatest impacts these days are entrepreneurial, adaptive, outward-looking, and sometimes a little messy.”

I like that, and I think using these four features or criteria to evaluate the MHSAA now and in the mid-range future would be good for those we serve.

  • Are we entrepreneurial?  How could we be more so?

  • Are we adaptive?  Are we flexible in how we do things?

  • Are we outward-looking?  Are we impacting school sports broadly and deeply?  Does the impact have staying power?  Are schools better because of what we do?  Are communities stronger for our doing it?

  • Are we sometimes a little messy?

I suspect that if we are the first three – entrepreneurial, adaptive and outward-looking – then messiness is a natural byproduct.  There will be starts and stops, failures before successes, changes.  There will be disagreements and compromises.

I suspect that we will have to tolerate a little more messiness if we are to move forward, even faster than we have, and if we are to have impact, even greater than we have.

Building Future Support

December 19, 2017

Editor's Note: This blog originally was posted December 17, 2013, and the message still serves purpose today.


Most students would rather play sports than watch other people play.

This is obvious; but often we make both little decisions and large ones that seem to ignore this truth. More often than necessary we create more opportunities for watchers than we do for players.

Ultimately this leads to non-watchers because people – especially young people – tend to lose interest when they don’t play. We know this because, in school after school, we find that the best boosters – the most frequent and fervent spectators – are the students who participate on their school’s other teams.

It is also true that those who played sports when they were in school, and those whose children now play in school sports, are the people who will support schools most strongly in the future.

This too seems obvious, but still, many school districts all across this state and nation appear to make decisions like it has never occurred to them.

Every time we cut a kid from a high school team, we create critics of our programs – the student’s parents today and this student in the future. If the program has no room for a student today, why would we ever expect that student or his/her parents will support our programs tomorrow?

No-cut policies for all outdoor sports and larger squads for indoor sports – beginning at younger grade levels – will be among the policies of school districts which hope to retain school sports beyond the next generation or two.