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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.

Scheduling Controversy

November 14, 2017

A dozen years ago, I asked our counterpart organizations in other states if they scheduled their schools’ regular-season varsity football games. Very few did so.

More recently, I’ve realized that I didn’t ask enough questions. It turns out that few statewide high school associations tell schools who they play each week of the regular season. However, many more give schools the group of opponents they may schedule. They place schools in leagues and/or districts and/or regions and instruct schools to schedule from among those schools only or predominantly.

I have been waiting for the tipping point where a sufficient number of high schools in Michigan are sufficiently stressed over scheduling football games that they would turn to the MHSAA to solve the problem.

I’m anticipating this might occur first among schools playing 8-player football, and that success there will lead to our assistance for 11-player schools.

One approach – the simpler solution – would work like this:

  • All 8-player schools within the enrollment limit for the 8-player tournament would be placed in two divisions on the basis of enrollment in early March. About 32 schools in each, based on current participation.

  • At the same time, each division would be divided into four regions of about eight schools.

  • In April, the schools of each region would convene to schedule seven regular season games for each school.

  • Based on current numbers, schools would still have two open weeks to fill, if they wish, for games with schools in other regions or of the other division or in neighboring states.

A second option – the date-specific solution – would provide every school its weekly schedule for all nine dates, or weeks 1 through 8, or weeks 2 through 8, depending on local preferences. This would not be difficult in concept once there is agreement on what criteria would be used and what value each criterion would have.

For example, one important criterion would be similarity of enrollment; another of great value would be proximity. Perhaps league affiliation would be a factor with some value. Perhaps historic rivalries would be another factor with a value. Then the computer spits out schedules for each school for every week for two years, home and away.

I don’t campaign for this task because, frankly, it will produce complaints and controversy. But if this organization exists to serve, then this is a service that today’s chronic complaints tell us we should begin to provide soon.

I suggest we do this for 8-player football for the 2019 and 2020 seasons (with a paper trial run for 2018). If it proves successful, we could expand the service to 11-player schools as soon after as they are satisfied with our efforts for 8-player schools.