One Thing
March 11, 2016
One of Michigan’s finest athletic directors is Plainwell’s Dave Price, who recently encouraged me with a school newspaper article about a student who epitomizes school sports, Plainwell High School senior Jessica Nyberg. She participates for the Trojans in swimming & diving, basketball and soccer.
Trojan Torch staff writer Jordan Raglon featured Jessica in an article on Feb. 17, citing how much teammates and coaches value her companionship and leadership. The author cited her accomplishments in all three sports, but what caught my attention was this statement by Jessica: “If there was one thing sports has taught me, it’s that everyone matters.”
I can’t think of a better theme for school sports, or a better mission for educational athletics.
At its best, school sports teaches that teamwork works. That substitutes who practice with peak performance push the starters to even higher levels of performance, and turn some starters into stars.
At its best, school sports finds room for every student, regardless of ability or disability, to be a part of the team so long as the student meets the standards of eligibility, decorum, discipline and dedication the school and team demand.
At its best, school sports understands that “everyone matters” means that no student is above the rules, and that failure to apply rules to one student devalues other students who have complied with the rules.
With the attitude that “everyone matters,” teams tend to come together, discrimination tends to end, and fair play advances.
Our Open Tournament
April 15, 2016
One of the criticisms we hear as a result of not seeding the MHSAA Girls and Boys Basketball Tournaments is that it doesn’t allow the best teams to avoid one another until later rounds of the tournament and often leads to anticlimactic Semifinal and Final games.
But, after spending thousands of hours and perhaps a million dollars to seed its Division I men’s basketball tournament, the NCAA had a 17-point mismatch when a No. 10 seed met a No. 1 seed in one national semifinal and a 44-point blowout between a pair of so-called No. 2 seeds in the other national semifinal.
Seeding is such an imperfect art, and teams can play so unpredictably from one day to the next in a one-and-done tournament, that seeding is more of a publicity stunt than it is a science on which to structure a tournament.
To send a team and its fans packing to distant venues on the basis of its winning percentage and margins of victory relative to other teams is not responsible policy at the high school level. It could be unsound fiscally and unsound educationally.
Our high schools enjoy a format that allows every high school entry into the MHSAA’s postseason tournament every year. If we were to limit our tournament to only 68 teams like the NCAA, seeding might be more practical. But as long as we accommodate 750 high schools in our Boys Basketball Tournament and 750 in our Girls Basketball Tournament, geographical districts with blind draws may be most appropriate.
The NCAA tournament, like so much of major college sports, caters to the few and most fortunate; so maybe seeding is good in that environment. But our high school basketball tournaments are open to all schools, and they require we make different decisions to serve those schools.