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Moving Forward
December 28, 2012
Coaches will often convey to their teams a variation of this theme: “If we’re not moving forward, we’re falling behind.” And with such immediate feedback – the next contest – coaches can measure their team’s progress quite easily. Progress is harder to measure for the organizations that serve and support coaches and athletes.
If we are doing our jobs well, we will have both an “inside game” and an “outside game.” We will create our own opportunities to improve our services and we will be alert to opportunities to improve ourselves when they are handed to us or forced upon us from outside sources. Both types of change can be positive.
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Change from inside has the benefit of institutional knowledge. This change can be informed, measured and careful to avoid unintended consequences that hurt more than help customers.
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Change from outside can be less rational but also less restrained by history and culture. It can be more disruptive in a positive sense, perhaps more innovative in origin and more expansive in impact.
It’s my sense that, as the calendar turns from 2012 to 2013, the MHSAA is at the merging of two lanes of traffic – an inside lane of change combining with an outside lane change – which will modify some services and move them forward at unprecedented speeds during the new year and the next.
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This has been obvious as we have partnered with ArbiterSports to prepare the ArbiterGame scheduling software for our member schools. Hard work internally that’s about to show results to schools and their publics.
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This may become obvious as we expand our schedule of inexpensive camps for inexperienced officials. This could be an antecedent to additional training requirements for MHSAA tournament officials. The public expects better, and we can do better.
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This may also become obvious as we expand offerings and then add requirements for coaching education focused on maximizing good health and minimizing risk. There is a gathering parade of experts and evidence advocating for much more training for many more coaches; and we must find our way to the head of that column.
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Valuable Volunteers
July 18, 2017
One of the most encouraging aspects of the job I have enjoyed for more than 30 years is what I see on display whenever I attend regular-season contests and Michigan High School Athletic Association tournaments. It's the many volunteers who make the events run smoothly.
From parking lot supervisors, to ticket sellers and ticket takers, to concession stand cooks and servers, to program sellers, to the dozens of people needed to time and measure and otherwise administer large meets in individual sports ... volunteers are the blood pulsing through the veins of school-sponsored sports events.
They work in numbers that amaze me; they work with consistency and longevity that humbles me. They show up years after their own children were participants. I can attend the same event several years in a row and see most of the same volunteers serving year after year. Serving with enthusiasm and with joy, and with no more compensation than a T-shirt, sandwich and soft drinks.
Appropriately, our trophies and medals go to the top-performing student-athletes. But my gratitude goes to these many behind-the-scenes adults.
Thanks for another great year.