Where are the Adults?
February 2, 2016
According to Jim Tucker, a certified financial planner and National Football League Players Association registered player financial advisor, writing for the Jan. 11-17 issue of Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal: “... university presidents, trustees and athletic directors are failing at their job of upholding the ethical standards of their universities.” They exploit, rather than educate, the so-called “student-athlete.”
He asks the right questions: “Where are the adults at our colleges and universities? Where are the adults to say no to football games on a day other than Saturday? Where are the adults to say no to athletic conferences that crisscross the country? Or adults to say no to a 35-plus-game college basketball season with excessive travel and missed class time?”
Behind the glitz and glamor of major college athletics is a program without, it appears, any rudder but the pursuit of more revenue, and less and less relationship to the educational mission of the sponsoring institutions.
I wouldn’t care about this. Except that the best predictor of what may go wrong in school sports is a look at what already has gone awry in college sports.
Those who pressure school sports to copy the college or AAU model miss the lessons that are all around us. We do not have to make the same mistakes.
Time and Money
March 29, 2016
Early in the current presidential campaign, several candidates postured to claim the support of Evangelical Christians. I found it all pretty phony. How do you know what’s really in a person’s heart?
I was once told that the best way to discern what may be in a person’s heart is to look at two indicators.
- Look at their calendar. How do they spend their time?
- Look at their checkbook. How do they spend their money?
Talk is cheap. What’s really important to a person is reflected in their calendar and checkbook (or credit card receipts): How do they spend their time and their money?
So, in this work of school sports, if we are truly committed to educational athletics, it will be obvious in how we – schools and the MHSAA – spend our time and money.
- Do we daily spend time promoting and protecting our brand of youth sports?
- Do we annually budget adequate funds for the purpose of designing, delivering and defending policies and programs that maximize the benefits of school sports to students, schools and society?
This will provide the proof of our commitment.