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A Solutions Approach

July 13, 2015

I had not been to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city, and I expected to see much change since my several visits before the flooding. What I discovered when I attended national meetings there recently was little change ... including most of the same sights, sounds and smells of years before. I expected the same of the national meetings ... “same-ol’ same-ol’.”
It has become tradition that the executive directors of the 50 statewide high school athletic associations meet twice during the annual summer meeting of the National Federation of State High School Associations in sessions separate from all other delegates to that large convention. It has also been customary for me to leave those sessions depressed as problem was heaped upon problem by the directors, with little attention to solutions.
However, between the two sessions this year, a small group of the executive directors talked about strategies to redirect the conversation; and the result of the second session in New Orleans was to develop a strategy for identifying and prioritizing the most significant problems of school-based sports, and then identifying and prioritizing the resources and alliances currently available, as well as those that could be developed through cooperative effort and strategic partnerships, to attack the most pressing problems.
The expertise to solve such problems has been in our room for years. What has been lacking is the commitment to a process that could move us from a group accomplished in citing problems and suggesting reasons for them to a group accomplished in working together to solve the most significant problems.
So, the “Big Easy” is and may remain pretty much as it always has been. But maybe future meetings of the National Federation, wherever they may be, will be undergoing substantive change.

Enhancing Public Health

August 29, 2017

Due to overuse injuries from sport specialization that is too early, too intense and too prolonged, youth may be increasingly susceptible to sports-related injuries; but school sports themselves have never been safer – for obvious reasons:

  • Equipment is the best it’s ever been.

  • Coaches have never been better trained in health and safety.

  • Practice and competition rules have never been more safety conscious.

  • Officials have never had more authority to penalize unsafe play.

  • Medical care and insurance has never been as available as it is today.

Our objective is not merely to keep making school-sponsored sports safer and safer year after year. In school sports – educational athletics – we also have the objective that students learn habits of a healthy lifestyle they can carry into adulthood.

In this way, school sports mitigates some of the damage of youth sports and contributes to the general good, to improved public health in America.

All that we do has that goal, and it’s a finish line we have not yet crossed.