Seeking Serious Solutions
April 13, 2018
Too much time is being spent on season-ending tournaments, and too little time on the regular season, and practice, and making sports heathier, and promoting student engagement, and the role of sports in schools.
There are exceptions, of course.
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The Michigan High School Athletic Association Soccer Committee is a rarity, expressing that there may be too much competition and not enough practice and rest in school-based soccer.
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The MHSAA Competitive Cheer Committee is constantly looking for the right balance of athleticism and safety – a blend that will challenge the best and grow the sport among the rest.
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The MHSAA Junior High/Middle School Committee is tackling large, tough topics and beginning to make culture-changing proposals to carry the brand of school sports to younger students.
These are examples of the conversations of which all school-based sports leaders must have much more.
Because our standing committees have often failed us and spent too much time on matters of too little consequence, the MHSAA has often resorted to special task forces or work groups to help get necessary things done.
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This is how Michigan got ahead of the curve on the length of football practices and the amount of contact. A task force was appointed when the football coaches association and the MHSAA Football Committee were ineffective.
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Years ago, it wasn’t a standing committee but a work group that brought us the eligibility advancement provision for overage 8th-graders.
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That’s how cooperative programs came to our state.
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That’s how we got coaches education started, and it’s how we extended coaches education to apply to more coaches on more topics.
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This is how we are making progress now – a Task Force on Multi-Sport Participation, and a Work Group on the Transfer Rule.
We need more of this – small groups diving deeply into topics over multiple meetings. Educational athletics has significant problems that require serious solutions, and new strategies for seeking those solutions.
It’s About the Base
May 8, 2018
Former Southeast Conference Commissioner Roy Kramer, whom Michiganders like to claim as our own for his East Lansing High School and Central Michigan University coaching roots, seized the opportunity of an acceptance speech for an award he received recently from the Tennessee Chapter of the National Football Foundation, College Football Hall of Fame and Knoxville Quarterback Club to deliver a sobering message regarding the game he loves so much – football.
His concerns were for the survival of football on college campuses “where their games will never be on television and will be played in front of less than 10,000 fans.” Which is the situation for 90 percent of the nation’s college football programs.
He also said, “I’m even more concerned about games on Friday night.” Mr. Kramer has been a long-time opponent of Friday night telecasts of college football games because they do poorly both at the gate and in television ratings, and they conflict with the tradition of approximately 6,000 high school football games played locally on Friday nights.
We Michiganders are sometimes criticized for our “conservative” views about the boundaries of a sensible scope for educational athletics. We come by this naturally, on the shoulders of people like Roy Kramer who, even after years in the glitz and glamour of elite college football, maintains his concern for more modest college programs as well as high school football.
It is this base of the game, not the few at the pinnacle, that is the future of a game under siege in dozens of courthouses and state houses across the U.S. – and worse, a game being questioned in many thousands of homes where football was once the game of choice.