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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.

Valuing Variety

January 2, 2018

Editor's Note: This blog originally was posted March 28, 2014, and the topic continues to be of prime concern today.


Some people see the declining number of multiple-sport athletes in our high schools as a sign that students don’t want the multiple-sport experience anymore and would prefer to specialize in a single sport.

Maybe that’s not what students want at all. Maybe, if we actually asked them, they would tell us so.

In fact, I hear that students dislike and resent the pressure their high school volleyball coach puts on them in the winter, or their basketball coach puts on them in the spring, or their baseball or softball coach puts on them in the fall and the pressure that coaches of other sports, both team and individual, place them under year-round.

What I hear when I listen to students – and admittedly, I often get to talk to the cream of the crop (e.g., our Student Advisory Council and Scholar-Athlete Award recipients) – is that they want to play multiple sports and that they need us to hear that and to help them.

I remember that when we began bowling as an MHSAA tournament sport a dozen years ago, we thought we would be appealing to and involving students who play no other school sport. We are. But we are also engaging multiple-sport athletes.

At the MHSAA Bowling Finals four weeks ago I observed many students in school letter jackets sporting letters for soccer and bowling, cross country and bowling, track and bowling, and other combinations.

It proved again to me that very many students really do want to participate in a variety of sports and that one of our core operating principles should be that we continue to facilitate and validate that experience for as many students as possible.