Our End of the Pool
June 26, 2012
The six-year veteran CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi, told Fortune magazine’s Geoff Colvin in a June feature, “Courage in leadership is very difficult, especially in today’s world, where the media doesn’t take time to really understand you.”
We can relate to this in our work in school sports, as very many veteran sports journalists and broadcasters have retired or been downsized, replaced by staff who are fewer in number and relationships and weaker in institutional knowledge and professionalism.
Whenever I read, watch or hear news accounts concerning topics that involve our work and about which I know a lot, I can see how incomplete and inaccurate the reporting is. This has always been true, but now is much more obvious; and this has made me even more skeptical when I read through other topics about which I know less. How much of this is opinion, not fact? What facts are incompletely presented? What “facts” are just plain wrong?
In this environment, it’s risky for leaders to step out with new initiatives; and it’s even riskier to defend the status quo, for the establishment is routinely presumed to be wrong by media who now often lack subject-matter depth and historical perspective.
Still, it remains the leader’s role, according to Jim Collins in Great by Choice, to not just predict the future, but to go out and create it anyway – in spite of criticism by media who have little experience swimming in our subject matter and who are merely wading into the shallow end of our deep pool. Sometimes creating the future means doing something new and different; but just as often – perhaps even more so – it means defending something whose existence helps to maintain the very essence of educational athletics.
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:
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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.
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At the same time, each division would be divided into four regions of about eight schools.
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In April, the schools of each region would convene to schedule seven regular season games for each school.
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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.