Logo

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.

Inner Life

November 25, 2016

Good reading here from Jody Redman, Associate Director of the Minnesota State High School League:

“The goal of interscholastic and youth sports is not to prepare students for a college scholarship or some professional career. It just doesn’t happen that often.

“Seventy-eight percent of youth who play sport will quit by the age of 12 because it just isn’t fun anymore and 97 percent of the students who go on to play at the high school level will have a terminal experience when they graduate. They will no longer play organized sports as they have throughout their youth experience.

“So what’s the point? Why do we play?

“We play to develop students into people with sound moral character that will prepare them for a life that recognizes the humanity of others, that is rich with empathy and compassion and develops in them the moral courage to stand up for what is right. When we only focus on physical skills and accomplishments we don’t give them the skills that will help them over the course of their lifetime, skills that will make the world a better place. We give them very little that has any real inherent value.

“It is time to give sports back to the children who play them. To focus on the true purpose of sports in our children’s lives. For this to happen, we have to establish a clear path, one that defines purpose, promotes values that are important to students and their community and defines success beyond winning.

“When we define success by the holistic development of our children into moral adults of character and compassion, then sports will regain its proper place in our families, schools and communities and most importantly, for the children who play them.”