Time for Tough Topics
February 28, 2014
The daily deluge of calls and emails about issues that matter that day tempt us to take our eye off other issues that matter today, tomorrow and for many years. Good service requires that we respond promptly and pleasantly to the daily details, but good leadership requires that we give adequate attention to matters more fundamental to the mission of school-sponsored sports, and more critical to the future of educational athletics.
No matter how many times we’re contacted about today’s programs and problems, we must create our own time to dive deeply into the core philosophies and cornerstone policies of voluntary competitive interscholastic athletics.
We have attempted to do this with the “Four Thrusts for Four Years” campaign to address health and safety issues, especially but far from exclusively focusing on increased acclimatization and decreased head-to-head contact in football practices. The practice proposals of the 2013 Football Task Force – developed over a series of meetings by serious people, appear to have widespread support and should receive an affirmative vote by the Representative Council next month.
Similarly, we have appointed a task force to work throughout 2014 on junior high/middle school issues. Theirs is the difficult challenge of locating the sweet spot – the policies that protect the multi-sport experience in a learning environment for our younger students while still providing more competition, and for younger grades, to attract and hold the interest of junior high/middle school students and their parents who are seeking much more competition much earlier in life than the MHSAA’s current policies allow.
Out-of-season contact by high school coaches with their high school students is another of the topics that is often discussed and occasionally studied, and the rules governing out-of-season coaching are frequently tweaked. The result is a mammoth section of the Handbook that is difficult to read and follow, and invites widespread disrespect. MHSAA staff is conducting a series of two-hour sessions to try to reframe the discussion and present to the membership by next fall a new (and briefer) set of rules and interpretations. The goal will be to respect both the guiding principles of educational athletics as well as society’s changes since the current rules were first developed.
That’s the goal for all of this these tough, timeless topics.
The First Time
April 3, 2018
I remember as clearly as if it were yesterday the first time I had to determine a student was not eligible under rules of the Michigan High School Athletic Association.
At that singular moment, it did not matter that I had been able to advise a dozen previous callers that the students they were inquiring about were eligible under the rules. All I could see in my mind’s eye was this one student who would not be able to participate as a full-fledged member of a team in a sport he enjoyed.
I assumed, as I have in almost every case since, that this was a “good kid,” and one who needed sports more than sports needed him.
But the facts made him ineligible and there were no compelling reasons to look beyond the facts. I knew it would be hard on the student to miss a season, but I also knew this was not in any sense an “undue hardship.” I could see that if the rule was not enforced in this case, I would be undermining its enforcement in other cases, and effectively changing the rule.
And I recognized that I did not have the authority to change a rule which the MHSAA Representative Council and each member school’s board of education had adopted to bring consistency and control to competitive athletics.
Many years have passed, and I’ve had to consider the eligibility of countless students to represent their schools on athletic teams. But I still see each situation as an individual student, balancing his or her individual needs and desires against the need to protect the integrity of the rules and the desire to promote competitive equity within the program.