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Remarkable Student-Athletes

May 8, 2015

Every spring I have the privilege and pleasure of participating in several league or local school events that acknowledge and reward the careers of student-athletes who distinguished themselves as multiple-sport participants with very high academic grade point averages. One of those events this year was the 2015 Senior Athlete Recognition Ceremony of the Capital Area Activities Conference. It was remarkable in several ways.
It was my fourth time in attendance at the event, which started when the league was smaller and simply called the Capital Area Conference. I was the speaker at one of its first recognition ceremonies. In later years I attended as our first son, and then our second, were among the evening’s honorees. But I found the 2015 CAAC event remarkable in two other and more important ways.
First, as the Master of Ceremonies Tim Staudt read off the intended college majors of the 200 honorees (10 per school), I noticed that not one of the students had declared the intention of being an English major, which was my college major and to which I credit much of the pleasure I’ve enjoyed as a human being and the success I’ve experienced as an administrator of school sports. I’m hoping some of these 200 of the CAAC’s best and brightest – a truly impressive group – will decide or even just stumble into an English major – a place to learn how to think and to communicate.
The second remarkable feature of this remarkable group of 200 was that the number of boys almost equaled the number of girls. This almost never happens, and that has always concerned me – that boys settle for athletic achievement alone while girls strive to achieve in athletics, academics, activities and much more of what a comprehensive education has to offer.
It is extremely important to the future of our society that we demand much more of boys than we are getting. If we expect them to be productive in life and to be good citizens, husbands and fathers, boys need to learn in high school that “settling” is not sufficient and that a life which revolves around sports alone is a life that will be disappointing.

The Power of the MIAAA

March 15, 2018

Athletic directors from all corners of Michigan are gathering this weekend for the annual conference of the Michigan Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association. This MIAAA might be the most powerful organization of its kind in the USA.

The MIAAA is powerful in its professionalism, in its commitment to ongoing professional training for its members.

Michigan has ranked consistently among the top states in the number of NIAAA Leadership Training Courses completed by interscholastic athletic administrators. The MIAAA attracts a higher percentage of its members to its annual conference than most states. And the MIAAA also conducts a smaller workshop for its members in late June and a leadership academy especially for newcomers to the profession early each August.

The MIAAA is powerful in its partnerships, most of all in its connections to the Michigan High School Athletic Association. Most of the MIAAA’s board meetings are in the MHSAA’s facility. The majority of the MHSAA’s Representative Council are MIAAA members. Many MHSAA staff participate in MIAAA programs, and many MIAAA members serve on MHSAA committees. There is a powerful synonymy as we pull in the same direction to serve school sports in Michigan.

This winter, as we watched a member school go off the rails over a transfer student’s eligibility, we were given a reminder of the power of professionalism and partnerships in the conduct of both personal and corporate affairs. While poison spewed from that school and two celebrity attorneys, the MHSAA kept a low profile and stayed on the high road. We worried less about defending ourselves and more about encouraging others to defend the policies and procedures they had adopted for school sports in Michigan. As usual, the MIAAA and many of its individual members led the effort.