Transfers
January 10, 2017
When it comes to transfers, the staff of the Michigan High School Athletic Association gets lots of advice, but it comes from opposing directions.
One camp thinks MHSAA rules are inadequate. This group suggests that we expand the basic period of ineligibility from approximately 90 days to 180 days and/or it wants the MHSAA to eliminate most or all exceptions that allow for immediate eligibility of a transfer student.
This first camp is so frustrated with high-profile athletic-motivated or related transfers that they want to clamp down on all transfers.
The other camp thinks parents have the right and responsibility to send their children to any school they wish and have immediate access to the full benefits of that school’s curricular and extracurricular offerings.
This second camp is encouraged by the laws of Michigan which have gradually extended “schools of choice” as an option that all school districts may exercise. And this camp will be emboldened if the Secretary of Education under the new regime in Washington, D.C. is the long-time schools of choice advocate who has been nominated by the President-Elect for this position.
This second camp is on the right side of history, no matter how much I dislike it and no matter how convinced I am that the better way to have improved public education would have been to invest more in neighborhood schools. Improving them builds most communities. Ignoring them, as we have for 25 years, sends surrounding communities into downward spirals that worsen poverty and public health.
The ill-advised efforts to improve education by enticing students out of their neighborhoods to attend schools elsewhere has undermined “local ownership” in schools; and it has had the side effect of encouraging more transfers motivated by or related to athletics. Monitoring and managing such transfers is made more difficult by these educational reforms; but the new world will not tolerate transfer rules that are seen as too broad and contrary to what has become public policy, however poorly conceived and executed.
The fact is, the future of the transfer rule will be less about extending its reach and more about retaining its existence.
Seeking Input on Seeding
November 21, 2017
Seeding is a part of some levels of some Michigan High School Athletic Association tournaments, but no part of any level of MHSAA tournaments for other sports. The decisions are made sport-by-sport and level-by-level after sufficient understanding of a specific plan and broad support.
Seeding deals with logistics, not a fundamental value of educational athletics. It gets outsized attention for its importance, having nothing to do with the interactions that lead to learning and growing in interscholastic athletics. It’s another byproduct of the ever-increasing influence of the pervasively promoted and televised NCAA’s basketball tournaments over the past 25 years.
Michigan’s high school sport most engaged in the topic now is, in fact, basketball. Discussions and surveys have been conducted regarding seeding at MHSAA District tournaments.
We’ve learned this summer and fall that a majority of our local school athletic directors favor seeding and do not think it will make regular-season scheduling more difficult nor cause coaches to delay or diminish substituting during regular season games.
We’ve learned that a majority favor a system that maintains geographically determined District tournaments and merely separates the top two seeded teams in each District, and continues to use a blind draw to place other teams assigned to the District on the bracket.
We’ve learned that a majority favors having the best two teams determined primarily through objective criteria assessed by an MHSAA created or controlled ranking system.
We’ve learned that while the majority favors these moves toward District seeding, there are significant pockets of opposition to any seeding at all in MHSAA basketball tournaments. At two of six Athletic Director In-Service meetings and at two of seven Update meetings in September and October, large majorities in attendance opposed seeding of District basketball tournaments; and voters were nearly evenly split at several other meeting sites.
The discernible pattern is that seeding loses support as one moves out of the more densely populated areas of Michigan. We need to better understand why this is so, and what’s behind these regional or demographic preferences; then have the Representative Council make a decision at its meeting in March or May; and get this topic decided one way or the other.
There is so much else that is so much more important than seeding to the health of school-sponsored basketball that deserves the attention that seeding has been getting.