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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.
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Thinking of Don Quixote
October 10, 2017
The athletic transfer problem is not confined to high schools alone. Recently, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has had a work group studying the NCAA transfer rule for Division I institutions.
The problem has been of particular concern in Division I men’s basketball where more than 20 percent of scholarship players changed schools between last season and this.
The work group appeared to have narrowed its study to two options: Make every transfer student ineligible for one year; OR, Allow every transfer student immediate eligibility. And the second option seemed to have had the early momentum.
But last Wednesday, the work group announced that the proposal to grant immediate eligibility to transfer students who meet certain academic standards will not advance during the current NCAA legislative cycle. Two days later the report was corrected: there's still a chance for change by 2018-19.
Major college conference commissioners and NCAA leadership have surveyed the landscape. They see athletes arriving on their college campuses from an environment where, if they weren’t happy with a team, they changed teams.
Apparently, the non-school, travel team attitude is bigger than the NCAA may want to battle.
Yet here we are, thinking of how to wage war on athletic transfers in high schools.