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We Get It
November 4, 2011
Participation in high school sports, both nationally and in Michigan, increased in 2010-11 versus the year before. It was the 22nd consecutive year of increases nationally, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.
The National Federation also conducted a first-of-its-kind attendance survey that tells us in 2009-10 that there were more than a half billion spectators at high school sporting events across the country. There were more than two and a half times as many fans attending high school basketball and football contests as attended college and professional contests combined in those sports.
We should be excited about our programs and encouraged by their historical popularity and continuing growth. But clearly, we are not. In fact, we are a discouraged bunch.
We are discouraged because, behind the good numbers that are reported, we see serious erosion – a subtle “slip-sliding away” of the principles and the popularity of school-based sports. In spite of the good numbers, we sense that all is not well in educational athletics.
In many places athletic directors are losing their full-time dedicated positions, which are essential to oversee a program of high participation, large crowds, great emotion and some risk of injury. In many places students are losing participation opportunities, which are essential components of a complete education necessary to prepare young people for the increasingly complicated and competitive world which they are about to enter.
We get it at the MHSAA. We know what’s happening. Not only do we get it, we also get the hundreds of calls from coaches who don’t have an athletic director available to answer their questions. And we get the hundreds and hundreds of calls from parents and others who can find neither a coach nor an athletic director available to address their concerns or answer their questions. Almost every time a school district dials down its oversight of the interscholastic athletic program, its constituents dial up the MHSAA to answer their questions and address their concerns.
Less money for and less oversight of school sports is a combination tailor-made for problems – for ineligible students and forfeits, for crowd control and sportsmanship problems, and for injuries; and in all cases, for the controversies that follow. There are smarter places to make cuts in our schools and still turn out smart kids.
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A Different League
December 30, 2016
Less than two years after The Palace of Auburn Hills completed $40 million of improvements to an already magnificent facility, there is serious talk of bulldozing The Palace to the ground after the NBA's Pistons bolt for downtown Detroit,
I once bought an IBM 360 mainframe computer for the Michigan High School Athletic Association office that was out of date within 12 months; and I felt terrible about it. But it was a modest amount and we did it with our own money. What is happening in Auburn Hills is, quite literally, in an entirely different league.
These developments may affect the MHSAA which has conducted one of its largest and most prestigious events – the Individual Wrestling Finals – at The Palace since 2002, and has a contract for this event through 2019. The tournament involves about 1,000 student-athletes each March.
I confess that it is difficult for an organization grounded in never-changing values to react well to the ever- and fast-changing landscape created by professional sports and major college football and basketball in their insatiable pursuits of revenue. We must, of course, and very carefully; but it's maddening.