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The Safe Play Game Plan

April 21, 2015

On Feb. 10, bills were introduced into both the United States Senate and United States House of Representatives, together called the “Safe Play Act,” which addresses three of the four health and safety “H’s” described in my last posting: Heat, Hearts and Heads.
For each of these topics, the federal legislation would mandate that the director of the Centers for Disease Control develop educational material and that each state disseminate that material.
For the heat and humidity management topic, the legislation states that schools will be required to adopt policies very much like the “MHSAA Model Policy to Manage Heat and Humidity” which the MHSAA adopted in March of 2013.
For both the heart and heat topics, schools will be required to have and to practice emergency action plans like we have been promoting in the past and will be distributing to schools this summer.
For the head section, the legislation would amend Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments and would eliminate federal funding to states and to schools which fail to educate their constituents or fail to support students who are recovering from concussions. This support would require multi-disciplinary concussion management teams that would include medical personnel, parents and others to provide academic accommodations for students recovering from concussions that are similar to the accommodations that are already required of schools for students with disabilities or handicaps.
This legislation would require return-to-play protocols similar to what we have in Michigan, and the legislation would also require reporting and record-keeping that is beyond what occurs in most places.
This proposed federal legislation demonstrates two things. First, that we have been on target in Michigan with our four Hs – it’s like they read our playbook of priorities before drafting this federal legislation.
This proposed federal legislation also demonstrates that we still have some work to do.

Seeding Discontent

January 3, 2017

We have heard for years that the Michigan High School Athletic Association Football Playoffs have created scheduling problems for schools and have caused the demise of leagues, no matter how many times the playoffs expanded – from 16 schools in 1975 to 256 schools today (plus 16 more in the 8-player tournament). Many other states with a variety of other football playoff formats report similar stresses on their member schools.

The inability of weaker teams to compete within a league and the difficulty that stronger teams face to find willing opponents to complete a nine-game regular season schedule are not uncommon for varsity football in Michigan, but are problems rarely experienced in basketball.

That could change if seeding based on wins and strength of schedule comes to MHSAA Basketball Tournaments.

With an easier road to District and Regional titles gifted to higher seeded teams, coaches will want a regular season schedule that is difficult but not too difficult. They will seek a league that is tough, but not too tough. This is the recipe for scheduling headaches. Strong schools will have difficulty finding a full schedule of games, while weaker or simply smaller schools will have difficulty finding a league.

Fearing blemishes on the regular season win/loss records, coaches will delay playing substitutes and avoid sitting out or suspending good players who are bad actors. Every eligibility snafu leading to forfeit will carry tournament seeding consequences. The temptation to hide ineligibilities and the inclination to fight forfeits, not infrequent in football, will come to basketball.

Developing a seeding plan is not at all difficult, but living with one could be.