PSAs Tout Value of School Sports
December 13, 2016
By John Johnson
MHSAA Communications Director
A pair of public service announcements promoting the value – and values – of school-based sports are now available for download from the MHSAA Website.
The annual Student-Athlete Belief Statement, featuring the 2016-17 members of the MHSAA Student Advisory Council, is a 60-second message the Association has produced since the SAC created the belief statement in 2007:
As the voice of Michigan’s student-athletes, the Student Advisory Council’s role is to convey the message of how high school sports are supposed to be played. We are responsible for helping the MHSAA maintain a positive and healthy atmosphere in which interscholastic athletes can thrive.
We believe athletes should be competitive, sportsmanlike and excel academically. We believe students in the stands should have fun, but not take the focus away from the game. We believe coaches should act as teachers, helping student-athletes develop while still keeping high school sports in perspective. We believe that parents should always be positive role models and be supportive of their child’s decisions. We believe officials commit their own time to high school sports and respect should always be shown and given to them.
The most important goal for student-athletes is to enjoy high school sports while keeping a high level of respect between all those involved in the games.
The second message was created by the Michigan High School Football Coaches Association in cooperation with The Sports Neurology Clinic at the CORE Institute in Brighton, which the MHSAA first aired during the 11-Player Football Finals in December. The 30-second Opportunities of Sport message promotes the values school sports provide to young people and addresses a need to understand concussions.
Both messages are posted in a high definition format suitable for over-the-air broadcast and a web resolution suitable for posting online. Additional messages promoting officials recruitment and other MHSAA messages can be found on the Public Service Announcement page of the MHSAA Website.
Another busy week looms ahead with live streaming video on MHSAA.tv being produced by members of the School Broadcast Program. Last week, SBP schools created more than 60 events, split between athletic and non-athletic programs.
In its eighth year, the School Broadcast Program gives members an opportunity to showcase excellence in their schools by creating video programming of athletic and non-athletic events with students gaining skills in announcing, camera operation, directing/producing and graphics.
The program also gives schools the opportunity to raise money through advertising and viewing subscriptions.
All sporting events – live or delayed – are available on a subscription basis only for their first 72 hours online. They become available for free, on-demand viewing approximately 72 hours following their completion.
Here’s this week’s MHSAA.tv schedule of video streams produced by SBP members:
Tuesday, Dec. 13
- Girls Basketball – Mt. Pleasant at Midland Dow, 7 p.m.
- Girls Basketball – Hopkins at Comstock Park, 7 p.m.
- Girls Basketball – Pontiac Notre Dame Prep at Lake Orion, 7 p.m.
- Boys Basketball – Onaway at Indian River Inland Lakes, 7 p.m.
- Girls Basketball – Negaunee at Marquette, 7:10 p.m.
- Girls Basketball – Ontonagon at Lake Linden-Hubbell, 7:20 p.m.
Wednesday, Dec. 14
- Ice Hockey – Grosse Pointe South at Detroit Catholic Central, 7:10 p.m.
- Girls Basketball – Remus Chippewa Hills at Vestaburg, 7:30 p.m.
Thursday, Dec. 15
- Boys Swimming & Diving – DeWitt at East Lansing, 6 p.m.
- Ice Hockey – Kingsford at Calumet, 7 p.m.
- Boys Basketball – Toronto St. John Paul at Alpena, 7 p.m.
Friday, Dec. 16
- Boys Basketball – Cedar Springs at Comstock Park, 6 p.m.
- Girls Basketball – Cadillac at Alpena, 7 p.m.
- Ice Hockey – Orchard Lake St. Mary’s at Bloomfield Hills Cranbrook Kingswood, 7:20 p.m.
- Boys Basketball – Lake Linden-Hubbell at Calumet, 7:20 p.m.
- Girls Basketball – Cedar Springs at Comstock Park, 7:30 p.m.
- Girls Basketball – Breckenridge at Vestaburg, 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, Dec. 17
- Ice Hockey – Bloomfield Hills Cranbrook Kingswood at Birmingham Brother Rice, 7:20 p.m.
Tuesday, Dec. 20
- Boys Basketball – Romeo at Lake Orion, 7 p.m.
- Girls Basketball – Zeeland West at Comstock Park, 7 p.m.
- Boys Basketball – Petoskey at Alpena, 7 p.m.
The NFHS Network has announced new pricing for 2016-17, eliminating the Day Pass and lowering the cost of a Month Pass to $9.95. Subscribers will have access to all live video and streaming statistics across the country. All content becomes available for free, on-demand viewing 72 hours after being shown live. Some schools also will be selling Annual Passes at a discounted rate. A portion of every subscription sold by a school goes to benefit its program.
A complete list of participating schools can be found on the School Broadcast Program page of the MHSAA website.
Fans can also access scores of games in-progress on the NFHS Network website via ScoreStream. Click on the Scores button in the upper right corner.
A weekly staple on the MHSAA.tv website and the MHSAASports Channel on YouTube is back for another year with highlights of selected games last week produced by members of the Association’s School Broadcast Program.
This week’s highlights package consists of clips of a Boys Basketball game between Bellaire at Charlevoix; and ice hockey game pitting Warren DeLaSalle at Marquette; and a Girls Basketball game between Escanaba at Negaunee. See below.
Schools interested in becoming a part of the School Broadcast Program should contact John Johnson at the MHSAA Office.
DVDs of MHSAA Fall Championships make a great Christmas gift, and are available for ordering through PrepFilms.com. All Final games in Football, Girls Volleyball and Boys Soccer are available, as are all of the Volleyball Semifinals and a variety of Football Playoff contests from the first four weeks of that tournament. DVDs are $24.95 each.
Audio of all of the Finals in Football, Volleyball and Soccer from the fall sports season, plus the Semifinals of Volleyball also are available for Instant download through the MHSAA Network website. Instant downloads are $4.99 each. Click on Archives.
1975 Class D Football Film Finds Way Back to MHSAA for All to Enjoy Again
By
John Johnson
MHSAA Communications Director emeritus
April 11, 2023
Chasing history was one of the most enjoyable parts of serving at the MHSAA for nearly 34 years. Researching information, but especially what I considered for a long time to be talking to the “old guys” (now I’m one of them) and soaking up their verbal histories of our games.
It also involved chasing down old photos, broadcasts and game films – especially those which preceded our more modern video era beginning in the 1990s.
When I arrived at the MHSAA in 1987, there was a shelf of old 16mm film canisters of an assortment of Boys Basketball Finals from the 1950s to the 70s – certainly not a complete set. The Association would shoot some game action from each quarter and the trophy presentations. They’d be sent out to the participating schools to show to the students (I remember watching a Mt. Pleasant Sacred Heart game in 1967 when I was in fifth grade). Some would find their way back to the office – most would not.
Will Robinson, the legendary Detroit Public School League coach who led Pershing High School to the league’s first MHSAA titles (in 1967 and 1970) after a district-imposed hiatus from 1931-61 from statewide tournaments, would pull my chain every time we saw each other about those games featuring Spencer Haywood and Ralph Simpson, among others. We never found them.
So it became a project to try and track down as many old game films of state championships as we could.
Any conversation with someone with a history tone always included a question about the whereabouts of a game film or video. One of those recently bore fruit.
When Crystal Falls Forest Park played in the 8-Player Football Finals at the Superior Dome in Marquette back in 2017, I spent a lot of time talking with living legend Bill Santilli, who led the Trojans to the Class D crown in the very first year of the tournament in 1975, and who would later coach the school to a second state title (2007) and serve as athletic director. He said he had a box on his desk collecting dust that he didn’t know what to do with – that box contained an old video tape from that game.
I uttered four little words – “Send It To Me.”
After a while the tape arrived in East Lansing, and I got our video production friends at When We Were Young Productions/Rush Media in Wisconsin on it. This winter, they found someone who could convert it and sent me a file that was recently posted to the MHSAASPORTS Channel on YouTube. You can watch the Trojans play Flint Holy Rosary by Clicking Here or watching above.
There are all kinds of old game films/videos and artifacts in attics, closets, garages, etc., in every town. Two of our Muskegon historians – Ron Pesch, the MHSAA’s history guy; and the old broadcaster, Jim Moyes, who called games on the radio for years in the Port City – can tell stories of their own about discoveries they have made. Moyes found all kinds of mementos while working on his book on the history of high school track & field in Michigan, and sitting with Ron at this year’s Girls Basketball Finals, he told a story of finding the mother lode of photographs from one of his other historical passions – silent film star Buster Keaton – who spent ten summers in the Actor’s Colony in Muskegon.
Pesch found a listing for Eleanor Keaton, Buster’s widow, using a telephone book (remember those?), made a phone call and shortly thereafter, on a vacation to California, was in her living room where he was loaned a photo album and family scrapbook containing all kinds of images from their time in Muskegon. Many of those images appear in a soon-to-be-released documentary, while the album and scrapbook now reside in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences library in Beverly Hills, Calif. You can preview the film by Clicking Here.
So if you think you have something of a state championship that could be utilized on a bigger platform and enjoyed by everyone, drop a note to [email protected]. If something needs to be converted to a more modern format, you’ll get a copy back, and the footage will be eventually viewable on the MHSAA’s YouTube channel.
To help guide your search, think in the following terms:
► Just about anything before 1990. But there are gaps during the 90s that need to be filled as well.
► Only Championship games and Semifinal games, unless something momentous occurred (like Richie Jordan’s 60-point game for Fennville against Bridgman in a Regional Semifinal in 1965, which is still an all-time tournament single-game record for boys basketball).
► For a list of what’s in the MHSAA archives prior to 2000 – Click Here. A long-term project is to get all of the games on the list and up to about 2010 uploaded to the YouTube channel. Most games from 2013-14 on can be viewed on the NFHS Network, and some games between 2010 and 2013 are available for purchase as DVDs from PrepFilms.com.
PHOTO Posing with the championship trophy after the 1975 Class D Football Final are (left to right): Forest Park tight end Bryan LaChapelle, quarterback Richard Mettlach, head coach Dick Mettlach and running back Bill Santilli.