Secret Sauce
April 19, 2016
The MHSAA has appointed a task force to meet throughout 2016 to develop strategies to promote multi-sport participation by student-athletes. In that spirit I have departed from tradition and will be identifying current students by name in this space, approximately once each month, who are the Superstars of Multi-Sport Participation.
Last month (March 11) it was Plainwell High School senior Jessica Nyberg. This month’s “Superstar” is Saugatuck High School junior Blake Dunn, who is on course to earn 16 high school letters ... four years of four sports.
My first thought was that maybe four sports each school year is too many and might get in the way of academics. But Blake is carrying a 3.95 GPA so far; so he appears to have that priority in the right place.
My second thought was that he must be an abnormally large and gifted physical specimen. But no, Blake is a pretty normal 5-11, 180-pounder. It’s hard work that people have described as his secret sauce.
My third thought is that Blake is fortunate to have coaches who will accommodate his passions and be flexible with practice demands so that he can be a part of two teams at the same time during the spring and also during the inevitable overlap of seasons from fall to winter and winter to spring.
School sports is a team sport. It’s adults working together to allow students to learn and grow in a variety of activities. It’s placing adolescents’ needs above adults’ desires, which might be the secret sauce in promoting multi-sport participation.
Well Before Their Time
July 18, 2017
The 2017-18 school year is the 55th that the MHSAA has operated as a not-for-profit corporation, and the 93rd year it has existed under the name Michigan High School Athletic Association. It existed under that and different names and structures for nearly three decades before that.
Now, in an age when conventional wisdom is widely criticized, and advocating for change is sexier than arguing for the status quo, it is perilous to pay respects to those who gave form and focus to the MHSAA. But before anyone dismisses these thoughts as archaic sentimentalism, it should be noted that the pioneering leaders of schools and school sports in Michigan were bold, cutting-edge administrators, far ahead of their time in many ways. For example,
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They had organized and professionally staffed a statewide high school athletic association in Michigan by 1924, well before most states – perhaps only Illinois and Wisconsin were more advanced in this regard.
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It was the leaders of this time, before all other states, who conducted high school tournaments for schools in separate classifications based on enrollment.
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It was they who, 20 years earlier, had transformed a brutal sport called football, promoted by gamblers and dominated by over-age semi-pros, by transferring control from communities and colleges to high schools, then became the first state to require helmets to be worn by all players at all times during interscholastic games, and then abolished spring football for high school teams.
And it was they, with leaders of three dozen like-minded state high school associations across the U.S., who challenged the status quo and brought a stop to national high school basketball tournaments.
In the 1920s, the most prestigious of several national tournaments was conducted at the University of Chicago. It was for boys only, and mostly for large city schools. However, the 1920s closed with two actions that signaled the end of this and other national tournaments.
First, the Detroit Public Schools announced they would no longer participate in so-called national championships – not in basketball, nor in national track and swimming championships. Their travel would henceforth be limited to Michigan (and for a time, only to Detroit).
Second, on Feb. 25, 1929, the National Council of the National Federation of State High School Associations went on record against national basketball tournaments. The resolution contained this prophetic preamble:
“WHEREAS, Our high school athletics are constantly being exploited by agencies and for purposes generally devoid of any educational aims and ideals, specifically, for purposes of advertising, publicity, community, institutional and personal prestige, financial gain, entertainment and amusement, the recruiting of athletic teams and other purposes, none of which has much in common with the objectives of high school education; and
“WHEREAS, This exploitation tends to promote a tremendously exaggerated program of interscholastic contests, detrimental to the academic objectives of the high schools through a wholly indefensible distortion of values, and, in general subversive of any sane program of physical education; ...”