Student-Centered Programming
February 7, 2012
For most of the histories of most statewide athletic associations across the country, the association has been a third party. That is, the association’s work was with adults - administrators, coaches and officials – who had more direct interaction with student-athletes.
That has been changing for most of these associations over the past two decades.
Today, MHSAA staff work directly with student-athletes through the Farm Bureau Scholar-Athlete program as well as at sportsmanship summits and captains clinics. We partner with the Basketball Coaches Association of Michigan to conduct our “Reaching Higher” programs for college-bound male and female players. We have a Student Advisory Council that works with us in our office, at meetings and at tournament venues.
After the Scholar-Athlete program, the oldest of our student-centered programming is the MHSAA Women in Sports Leadership Conference which began in 1989. The 2012 Women in Sports Leadership Conference, which concluded yesterday, addressed a “Leaders Show Up” theme. Three dozen presenters interacted with approximately 500 student attendees.
These direct interactions aid the modern athletic association in staying alert to the needs, desires and “idiosyncrasies” of students, who have always been the subject of the work – just less obviously and effectively than they are today.
The Rules We Use
February 9, 2016
The MHSAA Handbook of 90 years ago consisted of merely 21 pages, a diminutive 3½ x 6 inches in size.
The proposals for just the changes in the Handbook for 2016-17 require almost as many words as the entire Handbook of 1925-26.
The Handbook has grown to 130 full-sized, 8½ x 11-inch pages not just because we serve more sports and students than 90 years ago. It also grows because life is much more complicated. Society, schools and sports have much broader concerns today.
Every policy described in the current Handbook got there as a response to people wanting more rules or recommendations – sometimes to treat students better and other times to promote competitive equity, both of which are worthy objectives and should continue to be the rationale for proposals.
Occasionally I hear my colleagues in other states say we need to modernize our rules, to be sure we are not trying to apply 20th century rules to 21st century problems. I don’t disagree with that populist refrain.
However, before any rule is removed, those in charge must ask and answer: “How will school sports look without this rule? Will the problem this rule was created to solve return if we remove the rule? Will doing so create even worse problems?”
Rarely has the adoption of a new rule by our organization been a mistake. I cannot say the same for the removal of rules.