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Youth Should be Served
December 26, 2013
A half-century ago, youth sports were not well organized. Children directed most of their own games, playing each sport in its season, moving from touch football in the side yard to basketball in the driveway to baseball in the vacant lot where an apartment building now stands. They walked or rode their bikes to the venues, they brought their own equipment, they chose up sides and they agreed upon the playing rules and ground rules.
Even if young people played on a community team, they spent more time in pickup games on makeshift fields, courts and diamonds than they did in uniforms at the groomed settings of the formal youth league games.
Gradually, the leagues multiplied and the ability groupings stratified. Elite teams were created consisting of the more talented kids, who were really just more mature for their age; and they were provided with the most games, the longest trips and the largest trophies. It didn’t take long for the other players to feel second class and to drop out of one sport or all sports. In time, even some of the “good” players succumbed to overuse injuries and emotional burnout.
By the time most students reached the earliest grades for school sports, many had already found different ways to spend their time. It is often cited and well-documented that, today, 80 to 90 percent of all youth who ever started playing organized sports have stopped doing so by age 13. Before high school.
So it occurs to me that school districts should have both altruistic and selfish reasons to rethink their approach to junior high/middle school sports, which is now to engage students too late and offer them too little. Schools might be able to provide a better experience for the youngsters and create an earlier and stronger relationship with the philosophies of educational athletics at the junior high/middle school level, and that ultimately will strengthen high school athletic programs.
This pursuit will take great care in order to assure that schools themselves do not make the same mistakes we have seen in overzealous youth sports programs. We will have to find the balance where multi-sport experiences are encouraged so middle school students can experiment with new sports and discover what they might really like and be good at, while at the same time provide enough additional contests that interscholastic programs are a more attractive option than non-school programs that may always allow more contests than school people will allow within an educational setting.
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Cooperative Spirit
May 13, 2016
The 2016-17 school year will be the 29th since “cooperative programs” were first approved for MHSAA member high schools; and in that first year, it was but a modest step: two or more MHSAA member high schools whose combined enrollment did not exceed the maximum for a Class D school (then 297) could jointly sponsor a team. The intent, of course, was to help our very smallest member schools generate enough participants to have a viable program in one or more sports that was of interest to some of their students.
Over the years, the cooperative program concept has expanded to member schools of larger enrollment and to member junior high/middle schools. As of April 7, 2016, there were 260 cooperative programs at the high school level involving 450 teams, as well as 88 cooperative programs at the junior high/middle school level for 331 teams.
During the 2016-17 school year, there will be two new opportunities for MHSAA member schools to consider with respect to cooperative programs.
First, cooperative programs will be an explicitly stated option at the subvarsity level in any sport.
Second, maximum enrollments have been eliminated to help public multi-high-school districts start and complete competitive seasons in communities that have struggled to sustain programs in baseball, bowling, girls competitive cheer, cross country, golf, soccer, girls softball, tennis and wrestling. This is a three-year experiment.
It is declining enrollment more than a desire to save money that the MHSAA Executive Committee looks for when approving cooperative programs. Combining enrollments to create new or preserve existing programs is the intent; co-oping to reduce expenditures is not.