The Meaning of Success
December 8, 2015
All of the MHSAA’s fall season tournaments have ended. A small sliver of our hundreds of member school teams are clutching championship trophies.
Thankfully, those few trophies do not define success.
Some teams won their first ever MHSAA Regional title this fall, and a few more won their first MHSAA District championship ... and those go down in their local lore as the most successful teams in those schools’ histories. Deservedly so.
But even those situations do not define success adequately.
Some teams had their first winning record in many years. Some teams didn’t accomplish that goal but won twice as many games as the year before; and they rightfully claimed their seasons a success.
Some teams lost almost every game but kept pulling together without back-biting or complaining. And that too is success.
I once told a team of T-ballers I was coaching that they had a perfect record: six wins and six losses. Six times they had to deal with victories; six times they had to deal with losses. That’s also a good definition of success.
And finally ... singer/songwriter Sam Baker has written this lyric about his aspirations to play professional ice hockey: “I failed well; and that made all the difference.”
When Seasons Matter
April 6, 2018
There are people who want to fuss with Michigan High School Athletic Association tournament structures because, they say, they “want the regular season to mean something.” We need to guard against that thinking and such talk.
In school sports done right, the regular season always means something, even for a team which loses every game.
In school sports done right, practice means even more, because coaches and athletes interact in practice far more than games.
People who want to provide tournament postseason perks to teams which win more games than others are likely to reward the wrong things, like the teams that gathered transfers from other schools.
They are likely to miss the right things, like the teams that started slowly but improved over a truly meaningful season of practices and contests.
They are likely to miss the fact that some teams lost key players due to ineligibility or injury or gained them late in a season and where, in either case, team records are not a meaningful measure of the season.
Let’s not be fooled. Let’s not be trapped in the mindset of sport models that are more about business than education.
Gerrymandering postseason tournaments does more to undermine the integrity of the postseason than honor the regular season.