Our Laboratory
June 30, 2014
Failure: Lab is a speaker-audience experience modeled after TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design); but unlike TED’s frequent focus on success stories, Failure: Lab showcases stories of failure – and it instructs speakers not to provide lessons learned. Figuring out those lessons is the role of the audience, not the presenters.
Of course, one of life’s most bountiful laboratories of failure is sports. At least 50 percent of the participants in any athletic contest do not win. Sometimes it’s just one competitor out of 10 or 100 or 1,000 who wins.
In MHSAA tournaments, all but one team in each class or division ends the season with a loss. In basketball this past winter, only four of 729 high schools that sponsored boys varsity basketball ended the season with a victory.
It’s a fact; sports is a failure lab.
In the spirit of Failure: Lab, I won’t offer a defense or an explanation of the lessons learned. You’re the audience; you figure it out. Why do we go to so much time and effort to create this laboratory?
Enhancing Public Health
August 29, 2017
Due to overuse injuries from sport specialization that is too early, too intense and too prolonged, youth may be increasingly susceptible to sports-related injuries; but school sports themselves have never been safer – for obvious reasons:
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Equipment is the best it’s ever been.
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Coaches have never been better trained in health and safety.
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Practice and competition rules have never been more safety conscious.
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Officials have never had more authority to penalize unsafe play.
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Medical care and insurance has never been as available as it is today.
Our objective is not merely to keep making school-sponsored sports safer and safer year after year. In school sports – educational athletics – we also have the objective that students learn habits of a healthy lifestyle they can carry into adulthood.
In this way, school sports mitigates some of the damage of youth sports and contributes to the general good, to improved public health in America.
All that we do has that goal, and it’s a finish line we have not yet crossed.