Cohen Champions Treatment, Technology
By
Geoff Kimmerly
MHSAA.com senior editor
March 10, 2014
By Geoff Kimmerly
Second Half editor
Abby Cohen was looking for a problem to solve.
Two years later, she’s potentially only one more year from helping relieve a medical dilemma faced by 25 million Americans.
And the most impressive part might be that she graduated from high school a mere five years ago and is 23 years old.
Cohen, a 2009 MHSAA Scholar-Athlete Award winner as a senior at Bloomfield Hills Cranbrook-Kingswood, certainly could be called proactive, going back to her days as a volleyball, basketball and soccer standout for the Cranes. Less than a year after graduating from Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., she’s co-founder and co-CEO of Sparo Labs, which seeks to provide asthma sufferers with a proactive way of monitoring their symptoms and improving their treatments.
“Everyone has a different perspective on how to go about doing things,” Cohen said. “For me, growing up trying to improve in sports, I’d write down a list of things to do every day and actually do them, follow through. That aspect of always wanting to get better, and improve, is something that’s carried through to the rest of what we do at Sparo and in general how I approach things.”
On March 22, the MHSAA and Farm Bureau Insurance will recognize a 25th class of Scholar-Athlete Award winners. In advance of the celebration, Second Half has caught up with some of the hundreds who have been recognized (see additional links at the bottom of this page).
Cohen, who also served on the MHSAA Student Advisory Council from 2007-09, chose Washington based on its strong engineering problem and successful women’s basketball program. She studied bio-medical engineering and was a freshman on the Bears team that defeated Hope College for the Division III national championship in 2010.
But that first season was followed by a series of ankle injuries that required reconstructive surgery – and, effectively, ended her collegiate sports career. She still can play pick-up games, but four-hour daily practices and the other commitments of a varsity program would've been too much.
She missed basketball. But the end of her competitive career on the court, as it turned out, allowed more time to dive into a new pursuit – and, in her words, “work with another kind of team.”
“I’m a big believer in everything happens for a reason,” Cohen said. “It was disappointing having to have surgery to make everything feel better, for the long term, not just basketball. For me at that time, I didn't appreciate that with the extra time I could have, I could take the time to try new things, make the world a better place.”
Cohen planned at first to eventually become a physician. She shadowed a number of doctors, but decided that in the long run she could have a greater impact as an engineer designing products physicians could use.
In addition to her classwork, she helped form an extracurricular entrepreneurial group – and set out for an issue in need of repair. She and her now-business partner Andrew Brimer didn't realize how many Americans are affected by asthma, “that respiratory diseases are the only ones getting worse over time rather than getting better. That although technology is improving, why it’s not making a dent.”
They set out find out and make that dent themselves.
Through a series of interviews with patients, doctors, respiratory therapists and others in the field, Cohen and Brimer got an idea what could help – an affordable, easy-to-use device to allow patients to monitor on their own their symptoms so they can better manage them and the treatments to help. Cohen and Brimer designed a device that plugs into a smart phone and allows patients to blow into it like a whistle and register lung function readings – while also collecting data on medications, pollen counts, and other variables that affect lung function. Their device also should dent the health care costs that go with current testing, which generally requires an office visit.
Sparo will work over the next six months to improve its app interface and user experience, and then submit for Food and Drug Administration approval at the end of this year or the beginning of 2015 – with the hope it will then become available to patients later next spring.
Cohen is based in St. Louis, where she and Brimer have been able to work with three large local hospitals and within a nurturing entrepreneurial community. Brimer's brother owns a tech education company in New York which has provided additional support as she and Brimer discussed what was possible. “We were talking to patients and physicians, and it just seemed like the right thing to do,” Cohen said. “If we weren’t going to do this, who was?”
Cohen and Brimer have won 9 of 11 entrepreneurship grant competitions they've entered, netting more than $300,000 to get their lab rolling and allow them to hire two more engineers. Long-term, today’s work could just be the start of what Cohen hopes eventually will reach into developing countries as well.
She remains in touch with a number of teachers at Cranbrook-Kingswood – also, her mother Sheila Cohen teaches sixth-grade math at the school – and she spoke there at the end of 2013 as part of a TEDx event.
As she continues to build her team, Cohen is reminded of additional lessons she learned on the courts and soccer field – including a major one that will continue to pay as Sparo expands.
“Learning how to work on a team, with really different personalities, different people who all play different roles,” Cohen said. “That really came from sports – the ability to work with people and reach one common goal.”
Click to read the series' first installments:
- 25 Years Later, Scholar Athletes Shine On
- On Call as Doctor, Director, Mom
- "Mailloux Management" Goes Global
- Goorhouse Gives Back at Home
PHOTO: Abby Cohen (10) helps her teammates hoist a trophy while a player at Bloomfield Hills Cranbrook-Kingswood in 2009. (Photo courtesy of Cranbrook-Kingswood.)
Rep Council Wrap-Up: Winter 2018
March 28, 2018
By Geoff Kimmerly
Second Half editor
With a number of important topics filling the agenda for its Spring Meeting this May, the Representative Council of the Michigan High School Athletic Association prepared for a number of possible votes by receiving and requesting additional information during its annual Winter Meeting on March 23 in East Lansing.
The Winter Meeting frequently serves as an opportunity for the Council to discuss items expected to come up for action at its final meeting of the school year, scheduled for May 6-7. Since June of 2017, the MHSAA has been pushing several projects forward – with work on the transfer rule and junior high/middle school sports receiving the most emphasis.
Addressing the chronically troubling nature of transfers in school sports, the MHSAA has facilitated nine months of discussions with leagues and administrative groups across the state to develop a proposal that would make the transfer rule sport-specific – that is, a rule that bases current eligibility on the sports an athlete has participated in in the past. The proposed new rule would make transferring students ineligible at a new school in the sports they played the previous year at their old school. However, transfer students would be immediately eligible in any sport they didn’t participate in the previous school year. A list of exceptions, including a change of residence, would still allow for transferring students to become eligible in all sports.
The Council discussed how support for this potential transfer rule change has grown, and suggested the MHSAA send further explanation of the proposal to school superintendents and principals before the meeting in May.
“Since last summer, there has been membership-wide discussion of proposals that pursue the elusive goal of adopting a transfer rule that is simpler and easier to understand and, therefore, more consistently enforced,” MHSAA Executive Director John E. “Jack” Roberts said. “There appears to be broad consensus that we are on the right path.
“If adopted by the Council in May, the full effect of the changes would not be felt until the 2019-20 school year. What sports are actually played by a student during 2018-19 would determine that student’s eligibility after a transfer for 2019-20.”
The Council also is continuing work on a number of efforts related to the MHSAA’s growing presence at the junior high and middle school level. Under consideration is a proposal increasing the number of contests permitted within the maximum 13-week seasons for several sports, and another proposal relaxing or eliminating the Limited Team Membership regulation for most sports at that level. The Council also is considering expanding the MHSAA’s role as a presenting sponsor at events involving junior high/middle school students.
MHSAA membership at the junior high/middle school level has increased by more than 100 schools – nearly 14 percent – and nearly 70 percent of 800 member junior high/middle schools have begun accommodating 6th-graders in their programs since the MHSAA’s Constitution was amended in 2015 to allow 6th-graders to be included.
“The emphasis on policies and programs related to 6th-, 7th- and 8th-graders is essential if sports at the high school level will remain relevant to students and useful to schools which are trying to engage youth in 21st-century learning,” Roberts said. “We’ve also put many policies under a microscope to see if they can be modified to respond to our customers’ desires for more competition at the 6th- through 8th-grade levels while remaining faithful to our mission of providing these younger student-athletes the opportunity to sample sports and develop new interests and skills.”
A number of other topics were discussed during the Winter Meeting in advance of actions that could take place in May or at the Council’s Fall Meeting in December:
• The Council is considering two leading options for setting the girls and boys basketball regular-season and MHSAA tournament schedules after the 2018-19 season. For 2018-19, for the first time, the boys and girls seasons will flip start and end dates, with the boys starting and ending their season first. This will be done to adjust to the availability of Michigan State University’s Breslin Center to host the boys Semifinals and Finals. For 2018-19, no other arena available is large enough to accommodate the crowd that traditionally attends the final games of the boys postseason.
One option for 2019-20 and possibly beyond includes continuing the current strategy of using multiple sites for Semifinals and Finals weekends while accommodating Breslin (or another largest arena’s) availability – for example, this year’s Boys Semifinals and Finals were played at Breslin, while the Girls Semifinals and Finals were played at Calvin College’s Van Noord Arena because Breslin was not available for the girls weekend. (Breslin and Van Noord will be used for the 2019 Semifinals and Finals weekends as well, again to accommodate Breslin’s availability.) The second option would put the girls and boys tournament schedules over the same three-week period and use the largest available arena to host games on only two days; Semifinals would be played at various sites for both genders, with all four girls and boys championship games played at the largest arena during one weekend.
• Also in girls and boys basketball, the Council will consider possibilities for seeding the top two teams in geographically-determined Districts. MHSAA staff have created plans for possible implementation as requested by the Council at its May 2017 meeting.
• In football, the Council is considering options to assist 8-player football schools with their regular-season scheduling.
“While transfers and junior high/middle school programs are fundamentally more important than single sport issues, we have an eye on several that will generate significant interest,” Roberts said. “Schools which sponsor 8-player football will be receiving plans to assist their scheduling of regular-season games, and they will be asked to provide reactions through an online survey during April.
“Basketball continues to have two issues which have more public interest than genuine importance. One – the boys and girls tournament schedule and championship venue after 2019 – is moving toward a vote in December. The other – limited seeding of boys and girls District tournaments – is scheduled for action in May.”
The Council also talked about ways of involving more junior high/middle school students and at more grade levels, and what possible new high school sports might draw students with a wider variety of interests and abilities. There also was discussion on how eligibility and transfer rules are applied to boarding school students and what modifications would promote competitive equity between boarding schools and both public and nonpublic schools.
The Representative Council is the legislative body of the MHSAA. All but five members are elected by member schools. Four members are appointed by the Council to facilitate representation of females and minorities, and the 19th position is occupied by the Superintendent of Public Instruction or designee.
The MHSAA is a private, not-for-profit corporation of voluntary membership by more than 1,500 public and private senior high schools and junior high/middle schools which exists to develop common rules for athletic eligibility and competition. No government funds or tax dollars support the MHSAA, which was the first such association nationally to not accept membership dues or tournament entry fees from schools. Member schools which enforce these rules are permitted to participate in MHSAA tournaments, which attract more than 1.4 million spectators each year.