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.
Gut Check
October 18, 2016
After nearly eight years on the staff of the National Federation of State High school Associations, I accepted the challenge of leading an effort by a private business to consolidate the insurance needs of high school athletic associations and to control their coverages and costs through a self-insuring pool. My assigned goal was to assemble at least half of the 50 states in this fund. The need was so great at that time for comprehensive general liability and directors and officers insurance tailored to the unique needs of state high school athletic associations, that the group was quickly assembled and launched.
My time leading this effort was brief. In spite of the program's immediate success and continued growth, I became uncomfortable. The discomfort was born and grew in the fact that while I was out meeting with states, decisions were being made back at the home office that I was not involved with or aware of. I began to feel used ... my credibility was bringing in business, but changes were being made without my input; and I feared for my reputation. After a year of this, I resigned the position. That was 1981.
Nine years later, the companies' CEO was terminated when it was discovered that he used the construction of a company headquarters office to build himself a new house at the same time, burying his home construction costs into the books of the companies' capital expenses. Seven years after that, the companies' founder and namesake went to jail for operating from 1984 until at least 1993 what was determined to have been a Ponzi-like scheme.
I listened to my gut which, long before my head, knew something was not right. In fact, my gut seemed on alert well before things went wrong. This has happened at other crossroads and dozens of less dramatic moments in my professional and personal lives.
In this time of increasingly complex and difficult decisions, both personal and professional, the gut may be a good guide for us all.