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Out-Punting Our Coverage

March 19, 2013

Any traveler to the Atlantic coast of any Central American country will witness firsthand the arrogance of the human race.

Strewn along almost every shore is the waste of nations outliving their means.  Plastic in all shapes and colors, from products of all types – bottles, toys, sandals, tools.

Island nations to the east, unable to cope with the volume of their waste, cast it off covertly under cover of night.  Oceangoing vessels large and small heave it overboard.

My wife puts it this way:  “We’ve gotten ahead of ourselves.”  Humans have fantastic abilities to create, but we do so without conscience, without caring enough about consequences.

This clearly applies to the world’s waste problem – from cast-off containers to used cars to computers made obsolete in a matter of months.  We keep producing more and more, without plans for the waste of producing new products or the waste created by making existing things obsolete.

In the Pacific Ocean, a mass of trash the size of Texas is circulating as if there were a drain.  But there isn’t one.  No easy answer to flush human waste – the excrement of our greed – to some other place where it will do no harm.

In Chinese cities today the air, water and land are toxic – much as it was in developing US cities around 1900 – as China takes its turn to poison its people in the name of progress.

That we can do something doesn’t mean we should do it.  In sports terms, the human race has out-punted its coverage, and the consequences are far more dire than a punt return for a touchdown.

Future Actions

February 19, 2016

MHSAA committees have prepared not quite two dozen recommendations for Representative Council action later this spring. Once again this is a smaller than average number of proposals, and again they are modest in scope and significance. What has been different in recent years, and especially this year, is the length and depth of discussions by some of the committees.

Slowly, we are changing committee focus from tournament tweaks and other strictly transactional business to more strategic, even transformational issues.

Several committees talked longer than ever about health and safety issues, with attention to concussion and sports specialization, and how to accommodate and appeal to younger grade levels (6th, 7th and 8th).

I look forward to the day when these long discussions turn into provocative proposals. For example, I would love to hear that ...

  • The MHSAA Football and Junior High/Middle School Committees recommend MHSAA sponsorship of flag football at the 6th- through 8th-grade levels.

  • The MHSAA Soccer and Junior High/Middle School Committees recommend practice and game policies that reduce heading at the 6th- through 8th-grade levels.

  • The MHSAA Golf Committee recommends MHSAA sponsorship of coed, Ryder Cup format golf.

  • The MHSAA Tennis Committee recommends MHSAA sponsorship of coed team tennis.

There is so much more we could be doing to transform school sports for the 21st Century. New sports and formats, with increased attention to health and safety and the junior high/middle school level. This is our future, when talk turns to action.