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.
The Imperative of Institutional Control
March 13, 2018
Of the various criticisms about the MHSAA’s handling of transfers, these three have the ring of some validity:
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The Transfer Rule is too complicated.
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The Transfer Rule is poorly understood at the local level, and thus unevenly administered.
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The MHSAA office is ill-equipped to police the transfer scene.
The language of the Transfer Rule has expanded from a few sentences to many pages over its 90-year lifetime. This is the result of changes in schools, sports and society, as well as people operating at the edges of the rule, which has led to a rule that has attempted to cover more circumstances with more specificity year after year.
This increasingly nuanced rule takes both training and time. The MHSAA does an excellent job of providing training online and in person, but local administrators are not putting in the time – they can’t! They are usually less experienced but given more non-sports duties than athletic directors of 10, 15 and 20 years ago; and they are leaving the profession after shorter careers. They often lack the training and time to do the complicated and potentially contentious tasks, including Transfer Rule administration.
Overwhelmed local athletic directors are not shy about contacting the MHSAA office for assistance in interpreting and applying the Transfer Rule. These incoming questions dominate the time of MHSAA staff who have many other duties, including the administration of MHSAA tournaments in 14 sports for each gender.
Lacking sufficient staff time and subpoena power, the MHSAA must depend on local school administrators to police their own programs, communicate with their neighbors, and report what they believe might be violations within their own and nearby programs.
While we keep working on the language of the Transfer Rule, we harbor no illusions that it will become simpler to understand and enforce. That’s just not how the modern world works ... everything becomes more complicated. Which may only make it more unlikely that schools will dedicate the time and talent necessary to assure that the principle of “institutional control” is practiced by MHSAA member schools.
However, if we give up on that principle, no amount of oversight by the MHSAA office will ever be enough to police school sports in Michigan ... not just to monitor transfers, but also to attend to the dozens of other elements that distinguish educational athletics.