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Permission to Disagree

February 17, 2015

An organization leader who is doing a good job works hard to provide the organization’s board of directors all the history and detail necessary to make good decisions. Questions and concerns are anticipated, and addressed in advance.
As a result of this good leadership, meetings usually run with efficiency, decisions are made without long discussions, and debate is infrequent and never contentious. Votes usually reflect unanimous agreement.
While these are traits of good organizational leadership, a tradition of great organizational dynamics is disagreement.
If the board is always in total agreement, then management is not bringing the board tough enough topics. The subjects are not serious enough. They are operational more than strategic; they are transactional, not transformational.
Among the current topics of school sports in Michigan are two upon which there is certain to be disagreement: (1) the role of 6th-graders in school sports and the MHSAA; and (2) out-of-season coaching rules. We see the lack of consensus at the local level and the league level and between different coaches associations. And we expect the Representative Council will lack unanimity if these topics ever arrive for the Council’s action.
These are large topics, worthy of our time because of the disagreement, not in spite of it.

Brilliant Blend

May 24, 2016

This month’s featured multi-sport student-athlete is well known to the Michigan High School Athletic Association staff, having served for two years on the MHSAA’s Student Advisory Council.

Greta Wilker is concluding her senior year at Belding High School. She’s Valedictorian, and will have earned 16 varsity letters by the time she wears her graduation cap and gown.

Greta is Sports Illustrated’s Athlete-of-the-Month for May, and she is brilliant in SI’s video tribute.

Her softball coach, whom she calls her “second mom,” has helped Greta learn how to move seamlessly from mistakes to successes. An art teacher has taught her that excellence, not perfection, is the healthier life goal.

But from all we have seen and heard, perfection is the word that comes to mind when reviewing the kind of experience school sports has provided Greta. Not every contest was a victory; not every season was a championship. It has been a brilliant blend of successes and failures and wins and losses that work together in school sports to help form healthy, happy adults.