Sweating the Small Stuff - #2

June 1, 2018

Seeding of Michigan High School Athletic Association tournaments, especially basketball and ice hockey, is a topic that routinely finds its way to MHSAA Representative Council agendas.

In May of 2017, the Council rejected a comprehensive proposal to seed the District and Regional levels of MHSAA Basketball Tournaments; but the Council instructed MHSAA staff to examine ideas for limited seeding at the District level only, using an MHSAA-controlled system.

In May of 2017, it appeared there was a small number of Council members who supported the proposal submitted for that meeting by the Basketball Coaches Association of Michigan, and that there were two larger groups – one open to seeding on a more limited basis than BCAM proposed and another group opposed to seeding of any scope by any system.

MHSAA staff responded to the Council’s request by presenting in March of this year and again in May a plan for seeding only the top two teams of each District, to which teams would continue to be assigned by geographic proximity, and then placing top seeds on brackets that would assure those two teams could not meet until the District Finals.

The staff provided answers to the many obvious policy and practical questions, including the system to be used, the games to be included and the placement of teams on brackets.

The effort to arm the Council with these answers had the effect of turning some advocates into opponents of seeding. It was as if the more questions staff anticipated with answers, the more people objected to the plan.

This brought defeat to the plan to seed basketball Districts, and the same to plans to seed ice hockey Regionals and Semifinals.

The questions now are: Do we vote on a fully vetted plan, knowing the details before we move forward; or do we buy a pig in a poke, voting in a concept without details, surprising others and ourselves with how seeding would be implemented? And do we vote on anything at all until we have answered the large philosophical questions as well as the dozens of smaller practical questions that seeding requires we address.

Model Education

December 13, 2013

The athletic classroom is at least as pregnant with teachable moments as any other classroom of our comprehensive secondary schools.

I believe this so strongly that there is a tendency to overstate this truth; but if we include non-athletic activities like speech, music, debate and drama, I am even more certain it is true.

It is true in large part because nowhere in education will one find it to the degree we do in school activities that teachers are teaching what they want to teach to students who are learning what they want to learn, and both teachers and learners are willing to work hour after hour on their own time, even after the so-called “school day,” to make sure that everything that can be taught is taught and everything that can be learned is learned.

This is not a distraction from the educational mission of schools. It is a model of what more of education should be. And we shouldn’t hesitate to say so. Nor should we hesitate any longer to provide these model programs for younger grade levels.