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More than Fun and Games

September 24, 2014

Five years ago there were many skeptics when the MHSAA redesigned its website and included twice-weekly blogs by the executive director and active Facebook and Twitter pages as well as YouTube channels, and gave constituents and critics alike an opportunity to post comments. Some skeptics said we were being distracted with frivolous fun and games, and others said all this interaction would be a persistent source of problems.
In fact, for the MHSAA, this constituent engagement has been about much more than fun and games and it’s been a means to solve problems.
Our primary use of social media and other means of constituent engagement has been to drive people to high school events and to the MHSAA website where the distinctive messages of educational athletics would stand out.
Rather than creating problems, allowing the crowd to enter scores on MHSAA.com has led us to post more accurate scores more rapidly than when we depended on school coaches or administrators alone.
More recently we have been reviewing our event emergency plans and our office business continuation plans, which had been developed before social media became a fact of life; and now we are revising those documents to make social media the primary means of communication during such problems.
It is entirely through social media, primarily Facebook and YouTube – that the MHSAA has caused people to be talking about sportsmanship and inciting larger, more positive student and adult spectator sections at high school contests. That’s our award-winning “Battle of the Fans” that moves into its fourth year in 2014-15.

It’s Not Where, But How

April 28, 2017

As happens from time to time, but too often, the urgent has crowded out the important for the Michigan High School Athletic Association this spring. For example ...

  • A flooded soccer field at Michigan State University has forced relocation of the MHSAA Girls Soccer Finals in June.

  • The extravagant demise of The Palace of Auburn Hills following the relocation of the Detroit Pistons to the new Little Caesars Arena in Detroit is forcing relocation of the 2018 MHSAA Individual Wrestling Finals.

  • Lack of availability at MSU‘s Breslin Student Events Center on the dates of the three-day MHSAA Girls Basketball Semifinals and Finals in 2018 and boys championships in 2019 is forcing changes for those tournaments.

When, after countless hours of study and discussion, these and other venue changes are announced, they generate many media reports and considerable constituent comment – in fact, much more attention than two years ago when the MHSAA announced three actions that were unprecedented nationally to promote participant health and safety: mandated concussion reporting, free concussion care gap insurance, and two sideline concussion detection pilot programs.

Where MHSAA championships are staged is not inconsequential, but it is infinitely less important than how interscholastic athletic programs are conducted during practices and contests at the local level all season long.

When we are consumed with where we play, we divert valuable time and energy away from necessary attention to what we should be doing and how we should be doing it.