Sportsmanship is a Way of Life
January 4, 2013
Twenty years ago the MHSAA received a plaque from a member school that I continue to prize above all other awards our organization has received. The plaque reads: “In recognition of outstanding contributions to interscholastic athletics, and for promotion of sportsmanship as a way of life for all young athletes.”
There are no words I would more prefer to describe the work of the MHSAA then and now than those highlighted words. No work we do is any more important than promoting sportsmanship as a way of life. Reduced to a phrase, that’s our most essential purpose; that’s our product.
Not victories, titles or championships, but sportsmanship. Not awards or records, but sportsmanship.
It’s teaching and learning sportsmanship more than speed and strength; sportsmanship more than coordination and conditioning; sportsmanship more than skills and strategies. Even more than teamwork, hard work, discipline and dedication, it’s sportsmanship we teach and learn.
In Discovery of Morals, the sociologist author (not a sportsman) writes, “Sportsmanship is probably the clearest and most popular expression of morals. Sportsmanship is a thing of the spirit. It is timeless and endless; and we should strive to make it universal to all races, creeds and walks in life.”
Sportsmanship is more than a list of do’s and don’ts; more than grace in victory and defeat; more than how we play the game and watch the games. It’s how we live our lives.
Sportsmanship begins in our homes. We work on it in practice. It extends to games. It reaches up to the crowd. It permeates the school halls and shopping malls. And it begins to affect society for good, or for bad.
Not Right for Us
March 7, 2017
The proposal to utilize KPI Rankings to seed the District and Regional rounds of the MHSAA Boys and Girls Basketball Tournaments should not be adopted by the Michigan High School Athletic Association.
This is no criticism of KPI Rankings per se, or of its creator who is assistant athletic director at Michigan State University; but it’s not the right thing to do for our statewide high school basketball tournaments.
The KPI rankings is one of a half-dozen means used by the NCAA to seed its Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament. But the proposal before us is that KPI rankings become the one and only system for seeding the MHSAA’s tournaments. There would be no other criteria and no human judgment.
The result would be seeding that misses important details, like which teams are hot and which are not at season end, and which teams have recently lost players to injuries or ineligibilities and which have had players return.
KPI ranks teams on a game-by-game basis by assigning a value to every game played. A loss to an opponent with a poor record is considered a “bad loss” and has a negative point value. A win over an opponent with a good record is considered a “good win” and earns a positive point value. Margin of victory is a factor.
This is a nice tool for the NCAA to use, along with a variety of other tools and considerations that its billion-dollar budget can accommodate, but none of which is proposed for seeding the MHSAA tournaments. KPI Rankings is not sufficient as the one-and-only seeding criterion for MHSAA tournaments.
Moreover, dependence on a seeding system owned by a single individual, who is outside the MHSAA office, and who has the potential to move from MSU to anywhere across the USA, is a poor business strategy.
If there is to be seeding, there are more appropriate ways to do it for the high school level. But first there needs to be clearer consensus that seeding is a good thing to do, philosophically and practically. In the MHSAA we do this sport by sport, and level by level. And the jury is still out for seeding in Michigan high school basketball.