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The Needle

March 2, 2012

Jordan Cobb is one of the MHSAA’s superbly talented staff members; and one of his many duties may intrigue you.

Jordan watches “the needle.” 

The “chartbeat” needle tells us, at any moment, how many visitors we have to MHSAA.com.  It even tells us what page they’re viewing on MHSAA.com, how they got there, and where they’re located in the world.

Not so long ago, Jordan would fret on a Friday night in the fall that our servers did not have the capacity to handle all those looking for game scores.  Through lots of creative programming and work-arounds, and an in-house eight-unit “server farm” that shifts and spreads loads to accommodate peak demands, Jordan now watches the needle more in wonder than with worry.

On most Friday nights during the fall and winter, and for the entire months of November and March, MHSAA.com is among the one percent most visited U.S. websites – on any topic, not just sports.

Even on a quiet weekday afternoon, there will at all times be one to two hundred viewers navigating MHSAA.com.

A decade or two ago, the MHSAA office would not receive two hundred telephone calls per day or two hundred letters per week.  Now, every second of the workday and long into the evening and all weekend long, one hundred to one thousand people or more are making contact with the MHSAA at MHSAA.com.

So MHSAA.com deserves our attention and resources.  It is creating first and lasting impressions.  It is branding us, and doing so far beyond the walls of schools and the borders of our state.

Most importantly, it is demonstrating what we value.  It is conveying messages about who we are, what we do and what we believe.  And providing a stark contrast to who we are not and what we don’t do and don’t believe.

Centennial Celebration

October 20, 2017

The National Federation of State High School Associations is preparing to celebrate its 100th year of service during the 2018-19 school year. It may be unfair to boil down to a few bullet points a century of contributions to school sports, but I make the attempt here – with the credentials that there has been a John E. Roberts heading up a National Federation member state organization for more than 60 of those years (my dad in Wisconsin for nearly 30 years, followed by my more than 31 years in Michigan).

Here, in my opinion, are the four greatest gifts of the National Federation to school sports in America:

  • In the late 1920s and 1930s, the National Federation’s leadership influenced the end of national high school tournaments. First four, then a dozen and then two dozen very young state high school associations, through their even younger National Federation, successfully challenged prestigious universities (like the University of Chicago) and the biggest names in college sports (like Amos Alonzo Stagg) who conducted national high school tournaments.

  • During the next decades, and one sport at a time, the National Federation assumed from the colleges and non-school organizations responsibility for writing the playing rules for high school level competition, intentionally crafting rules that promoted greater participant safety and much more ease of understanding and enforcement by contest officials. The National Federation now releases about 40 publications each year, serving 16 different sports.

  • At the start of the new millennium, the National Federation began its march to emerge as the nation’s most prolific provider of online education for coaches. The National Federation now has more than 50 different online courses available, including more than 20 free courses; and approximately five million courses have been delivered.

  • In 2013, the NFHS Network was launched to provide a digital broadcast home for state high school association tournaments and the School Broadcast Program. With more than 3,000 events produced each month now, this is the most effective platform in National Federation history for promoting the excitement, diversity and values of school-sponsored sports.