Travel Bug
November 2, 2012
International trips for U.S. youth sports teams is a big business. Sometimes the target is school sports teams; and sometimes those schools and communities get foreign travel fever.
While I have nothing against international travel – in fact, it’s a hobby my wife and I enthusiastically share – I caution against international trips for teams or individual athletes.
Sometimes the competition is badly matched. Sometimes our teams encounter and are routed by another country’s “national team.” More often, our teams encounter poorly organized events and weak, thrown-together opposing teams and substandard venues. But that’s not the major concern here.
Several years ago, a Michigan community spent $23,000 to help send 20 baseball players from three of its high schools to participate overseas. That’s nice, but the school district didn’t have a junior high baseball program; and I wondered if the community fundraising might not have been used to provide new opportunities for more student-athletes.
About the same time, there was an effort to fund one basketball player from each of a league’s schools to compete in an international basketball tournament. The cost was $2,200 for each student; and again I wondered if those communities might not have uses for the money that could provide benefit to more student-athletes.
Why do we spend thousands on a few when the same amounts of money could restore or expand opportunities for many? Why do we focus on the fortunate few while the foundations of our programs rot through eliminated junior high programs and pay-for-play senior high programs?
No one can argue that some of these trips do some of our students some good. But do they offer enough good for the few at a time when many students aren’t being offered even the basic opportunities of interscholastic athletics?
Local leadership should say “No” to requests to support expensive international trips. There’s need for them to put more into the foundation of our programs and less into foreign travel.
Leadership Impressions - #3 (Embracing Interruptions)
June 15, 2018
I was once told that “the job is the interruptions” – to look at an interruption not as something that detracts from my work but rather is the work. But there are two types of interruptions that have gotten my special attention over the years.
One type happens often, perhaps twice a week when averaged over the course of a year. It happens when the assistant directors of the Michigan High School Athletic Association are asked a novel Handbook question, one of first impression in their experience, and there is a difference of opinion among their colleagues as to the correct answer.
I expect to be involved in answering such questions; and sometimes I determine that the question needs MHSAA Executive Committee attention – for ultimately under the MHSAA Constitution, it is the Executive Committee’s responsibility to interpret what is not clear in Handbook Regulations and Interpretations.
The other type of interruption happens not twice a week but about twice a year, when a legal challenge confronts the MHSAA. It has been our practice to keep other staff focused on the daily business of the MHSAA, helping to make tournaments and other programs operate without distraction; while the executive director (as well as the associate director in more recent years) deals with litigation, which is usually a three- to six-month sprint but can also be a three- to six-year marathon.
I expect to insulate other staff from these diversions that can suck time and energy out of a forward-looking staff.
We anticipate that every day will bring us questions that were not on that day’s to-do list. We try to treat those interruptions as an important part of our work.