Our Best and Brightest
April 12, 2015
The best two hours of each work year are those spent with the MHSAA Scholar-Athletes and their parents on the last Saturday of the winter tournament season.
This is a happy and pardonably proud group who epitomize the best of what our schools and school sports produce because of the giftedness of the student-athletes and their grit to maximize those gifts with the help of family and the faculty of member schools.
This year’s 32 recipients of $1,000 scholarships represent 22 of the 28 MHSAA tournament sports. The 32 recipients average 2.56 sports per person, and their average GPA is 3.95.
Five of this year’s class have won MHSAA state championships as individuals or members on a team. Nineteen of this year’s class have perfect 4.0 GPAs.
Over the years, 323 MHSAA high schools have been represented with scholarship winners; and this year, 10 students were first-time winners for their schools.
This is the 26th year of this program, underwritten since its inception by Michigan Farm Bureau, which has now invested $652,000 in MHSAA's scholar-athletes. The longevity and generosity of this sponsorship is Michigan at its best.
And these 32 students are among our state’s most precious resources for creating a better future for our state, nation and world.
Striking A Balance
January 23, 2018
This past fall, the feature topic of the seven Update Meetings of the Michigan High School Athletic Association was the Transfer Rule ... its history, rationale and reasons why it should and shouldn’t be altered to counter the transfer epidemic that school of choice laws and the youth sports travel team culture have infected upon school-sponsored sports in this and other states.
The Update Meeting presentation included cautions that, while the vast majority of school administrators and coaches want a tougher and tighter transfer rule with longer periods of ineligibility and fewer exceptions that permit immediate eligibility, many people outside of school sports believe such changes would infringe upon their individual choices; and even some people involved in school sports at the local level lose interest in supporting the rules already in place when they are applied to their own situation.
The Update Meeting concerns have been legitimized during more recent months in both high and low profile situations.
There are suggestions that the MHSAA should have an investigations department to search for and penalize athletic-oriented transfers and unscrupulous acts by coaches, parents and others. Which is a foolish notion. The MHSAA does not have subpoena power, can’t perform wiretaps, and cannot devote the personnel and other resources that an investigations department would require. Even with hundreds of millions of dollars in resources, the NCAA has not been able to execute that function for intercollegiate sports, and recently the FBI stepped in to do the difficult work.
As has been its long-standing and generally effective practice, the MHSAA relies heavily on its member schools to help enforce its rules, which schools agree to do as a condition of their voluntary membership.
At the other extreme are suggestions to do away altogether with transfer eligibility rules. Let anything and everything go. Which is what we call the AAU, an incompatible approach to student-centered, school-sponsored sports.
Striking a balance is a difficult, but worthwhile endeavor. To that end, the MHSAA Representative Council works tirelessly on behalf of member schools to establish the proper set of rules to create competitive equity.