Outside View
October 4, 2011
Steve Jobs’ departure from Apple and then his death on Oct. 5 has caused just about every newspaper and business and technology magazine and online newsletter to provide its take on what Jobs meant to Apple, and to the world we live in.
Among the analyses I’ve read that could be most helpful to those in leadership of school sports is that of Cliff Kuang, before Jobs' death, in the October 2011 issue of Fast Company. In “What Steve Jobs Can Still Teach Us,” Kuang comments on Jobs’ “ability to see a company from the outside, rather than inside as a line manager.”
Over his career, observes Kuang, “He (Jobs) became less enamored of tech for tech’s sake. He blossomed into a user-experience savant.” He took the “outside view of a user.” Ultimately for Jobs, “usability was more important than capability.”
I suspect it would do us all well to take the same approach to school sports at the local and state levels; that is, to keep thinking about how the programs appear from the outside. How they appear to the end-user.
It’s all well and good that our rules are correct in their philosophy; but if they don’t make sense to end-users or don’t work in practical application, we may have problems. Same is true for our events, and for our technology.
It is impossible to expect complete understanding of all the policies and procedures of school sports or to avoid all controversy when the competing interests of partisans are involved as is the case in athletics. Remembering, therefore, that the task is not to please but to serve is a necessary mindset, because service in this work often means saying “No” or citing violations and requiring forfeits.
But even as we do these necessary but unpleasant things, which we know in advance will not be universally understood and supported, it is good to be mindful of how it all looks from the outside. It is most important that those in the necessary positions of doing these things be professional and consistent, with a steadfast commitment to apply policies and procedures uniformly. When people view the organization from the outside, even if they don’t fully understand or agree with a decision, they must see that each rule is applied identically to every school, without favoritism, and that rules are not just made up as we go along to relieve a pressure point or grease a squeaky wheel.
The Usual Suspects
December 30, 2016
It is difficult to find a year when the 11-player Football Finals of the Michigan High School Athletic Association involved more teams from southeast Michigan than appeared at Ford Field in 2016. In fact, just two counties (Oakland and Wayne) produced seven finalists. But then two counties on Michigan’s west side (Kent and Muskegon) supplied four of the 16 finalists.
Four of Michigan’s 83 counties producing 11 of 16 finalists in the 11-player championship games doesn’t’ feel like a statewide event; but one team from the Upper Peninsula, another from the Leelanau Peninsula in the northwest portion of the Lower Peninsula, and a team located along the Michigan/Ohio border remind us how large and diverse our state really is.
The 2016 MHSAA 11-player Football Finals consisted of many of the “usual suspects,” including two teams pursuing their fourth straight titles and one team seeking its third consecutive championship. Four of the eight 11-player champions from 2015 returned in the attempt to defend their titles in 2016, and two of the runners-up in 2015 were back to try to reverse their fortunes from 12 months earlier.
What is being demonstrated here in Michigan high school football is the trend seen in many other states. That is, as the number of classes or divisions of tournaments expands, the more often you see the same teams in the final rounds.
The surest way to have the “usual suspects” on championship day is to put them in tournaments with fewer schools. And of all MHSAA tournaments, the football playoffs have the most divisions with the fewest schools in each. The result is predictable.
This is a cautionary tale for those who desire that the number of classifications and divisions be expanded in MHSAA tournaments for other sports.
Meanwhile, we are keeping an eye on the tournament format in a neighboring state that places schools into divisions for larger schools after they are too successful over consecutive years in the classification that fits their enrollment. Those in Michigan who have been assigned to review such policies have complained that such “success factors” penalize future students because of the achievements of previous students and/or because such factors do nothing about “chronic success” by schools in the largest classification.