The Rules We Use
February 9, 2016
The MHSAA Handbook of 90 years ago consisted of merely 21 pages, a diminutive 3½ x 6 inches in size.
The proposals for just the changes in the Handbook for 2016-17 require almost as many words as the entire Handbook of 1925-26.
The Handbook has grown to 130 full-sized, 8½ x 11-inch pages not just because we serve more sports and students than 90 years ago. It also grows because life is much more complicated. Society, schools and sports have much broader concerns today.
Every policy described in the current Handbook got there as a response to people wanting more rules or recommendations – sometimes to treat students better and other times to promote competitive equity, both of which are worthy objectives and should continue to be the rationale for proposals.
Occasionally I hear my colleagues in other states say we need to modernize our rules, to be sure we are not trying to apply 20th century rules to 21st century problems. I don’t disagree with that populist refrain.
However, before any rule is removed, those in charge must ask and answer: “How will school sports look without this rule? Will the problem this rule was created to solve return if we remove the rule? Will doing so create even worse problems?”
Rarely has the adoption of a new rule by our organization been a mistake. I cannot say the same for the removal of rules.
The Social Setting
March 18, 2014
Between these headlines was one of more significance: Facebook announced that it would be paying $19 billion to purchase WhatsApp. Which means social media is here to stay. And everybody, including big time basketball coaches, needs to deal with it in better ways than merely blasting it and/or barring it.
What it means for an organization like mine is that everything we do needs to be considered in all the usual goals, objectives and strategies progressions, and that at least one progression must have social media as an outcome and almost all progressions must have social media as a tactic.
Just over a decade ago we realized that almost every task we have has an information technology component. We discovered we needed our IT staff in the room when new projects or protocols were being considered, when new policies were being developed, and when all sorts of problems were being addressed. Fail to involve IT personnel soon enough or at all, we learned, and failure of the enterprise was assured.
We are at the same point today with social media. If we neglect the social media component – fail to consider how to use it to the advantage of the project or fail to consider how adverse social media could doom the project – we operate with at least one hand tied behind our back.
Just as the IT staff have needed to be consulted, and listened to, in order for the enterprise to reach its potential, so must our social media staff have a seat at the table and a voice in the discussion of anything of consequence we might think we should do.
This is as true for nonprofit organizations as it is for profit, for small organizations and large, both private and public.