On the Move
June 8, 2012
Two members of the MHSAA’s executive staff live on the same side of the same town. Each lives less than a five-minute drive to the MHSAA building; and yet they live in differently named neighborhoods, taking the names of the public elementary schools which serve their sections of town and the school district.
Students of those two elementary schools feed the one and only public middle school of the district, which feeds the one and only public high school of the district. Historically, there would not be too much to deter the children raised in these two homes from attending the same schools.
However, if one of the families is Catholic, it might choose to send its children to the Catholic grade school located across the street from the public high school. And it might decide to send its children to high school at the Catholic high school in the town which neighbors to the west.
If one of the families were inclined, it might choose to home school its children before sending them to the district’s high school or to one of two Christian high schools nearby.
Or perhaps one of the families would choose to send one of their children to a charter school near the location of the mother’s employment. Perhaps another child would be a school of choice student at a traditional high school convenient to the father’s place of work but in a different school district. These are common occurrences today that were rare just 15 years ago.
A multitude of other factors could affect the choice of school:
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One school might be better known than others for a particular curriculum strength, or it might have a strong reputation in drama or music or sports, or in one particular sport.
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Children are more likely today to have mingled on non-school youth sports teams and to decide to stay together for high school teams.
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High school students might attend the same summer camps and be attracted to a different group of kids or a coach, and transfer to join the new group or coach.
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As families relocate more frequently, students are required to transfer; and as the nuclear family becomes less stable, students are more often forced to change domestic settings, and change schools.
These and other factors – some worthy or unavoidable, some unhealthy and contrived – add up to the following:
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During the entire 1986-87 school year, the MHSAA Executive Committee processed 96 requests by member schools to waive eligibility rules, and 58 of those requests were for student transfers.
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25 years later, the total requests for the school year were 462; and of those, 337 were to waive the transfer section of the eligibility regulation.
This demonstrates in numbers what we have observed to be true: that during the past quarter century, the clientele of high school athletics has become five times more mobile. It’s one of school sports’ greatest challenges.
The Next Big Thing
February 16, 2016
The full-time athletic director, without a lot of other duties and with support for clerical matters as well as event supervision, is a situation rarely seen in secondary schools today. That’s bad for students, schools and school sports.
Today, typically the athletic director’s job is divided among many areas of a school’s operations. And when a veteran athletic director retires, moves up or otherwise moves on, it is typical that the “replacement” is an inexperienced person who is given even more to do with less time to do it.
So, when I asked the MHSAA Representative Council in December to talk about and commit to writing what it believes is the “next big thing” the MHSAA should be doing, it was not surprising to me that the consensus was this: “We should be conducting much more Athletic Director In-Service training, both in person and electronically, for both new ADs and veterans; and we shouldn’t shy away from a ‘back-to basics’ approach, with testing.”
The theme of the responses of Representative Council members in December was that as schools are becoming increasingly under-resourced, the MHSAA must do more. Clearly, the Representative Council (as a group) has lower expectations for what schools can do for themselves, and higher expectations for what the MHSAA should be doing to help schools. If there is a worry in all this, it is that the Representative Council is losing confidence in the principle of “institutional control,” and the Council sees the need to place increasing demands on the MHSAA to train, oversee and actually do things that would have been an overreach of our proper role 20 or even 10 years ago.
The transformational idea here – I don’t like it, but perhaps it’s unavoidable – is that the MHSAA must do more because of the reality that overburdened, under-resourced school personnel can only do less. And, if we fail to do more, school sports will continue to create problems for itself, and worse, continue to drift to a point where school sports are barely distinguishable from non-school sports programs.
We are seeing building athletic directors less engaged in the administration of school sports and, in their place, local administrators are depending on third parties to schedule games and assign officials, or they are delegating scheduling and most administrative details to their coaches, an increasing number of whom are nonfaculty members who have more affinity to non-school sports than school sports. This isn’t just happening in skiing, golf and bowling but also in basketball and other sports.
As we inventory the controversies we’ve endured this past fall, we see that in almost every case there was a lack of knowledge or execution at the local level that created a problem which people then were all too ready to blame the MHSAA for. The policy or the organization gets criticized for an individual’s deficient attention or action at the local level. And every controversy is a distraction – it gets in the way of our work, and it adversely affects our ability to convey a positive message about the important role of educational athletics in the lives of students, schools and society.