One More Call
November 23, 2011
This blog continues with lessons learned on my highly motivating but sometimes hot seat at the MHSAA. It’s Lesson No. 4: Make one more call.
Not 100 percent of the time, but well over 50 percent of the time, if I had made one more call before making or communicating a tough decision, either the decision would have been different or, more often, the decision would have been received better.
Obviously there are limits to this. There always could be one more call. But it has become a “Roberts Rule of Order” anyway to make one more call. For I can trace an inordinate percentage of wrong decisions, or bad reactions to correct decisions, to not making one more call.
More often than not on difficult decisions, I work in tandem with other MHSAA staff and especially Associate Director Tom Rashid who now routinely makes that one more call. It has improved both our decisions and communications.
Prep Prose
January 27, 2017
Mick McCabe retired in December after almost five full decades at the Detroit Free Press.
When Mick agreed with me, he did so boldly. When he disagreed, he sometimes did so brutally.
He was at his best, and did most for school sports in Michigan, when he told the stories of coaches and athletes in the cities, suburbs and small towns all across our state. Especially when he told the stories of those who would never coach or play a game beyond the high school level. Especially when he found and focused on an unknown person in a low-profile sport who raised our spirits by reminding us of how good educational athletics can be.
Mick may have written more words about high school sports in Michigan than any person ever. And that's saying a lot when one remembers Jack Moss and Bob Gross and Bob Becker and Jane Bos and Del Newell and Cindy Fairfield and a dozen other retired sports writers in our state whose substantial bodies of work promoted prep sports.
School sports usually has been well-served by such media professionals who were allowed by their industry to take the time necessary to know the people and the policies that served school sports, and were allowed the space to develop stories that went beyond headlines, tweets and texts, with fuller facts and closer truth than is the norm today.