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This Week in High School Sports: 11/17/17
November 17, 2017
This week’s show features Stacey Starr of Muskegon Reeths-Puffer’s 1992 MHSAA Class A champion football team, passes out Game Balls to Taylor Fleming of Rogers City volleyball and Austin Persson of Iron River West Iron County football, talks about pass interference in the Be The Referee segment and previews a full weekend of broadcasts on the NFHS Network.
The 5-minute program, powered by MI Student Aid, leads off each week with feature stories from around the state from the MHSAA’s Second Half or network affiliates. "Be The Referee," a 60-second look at the fine art of officiating, comes in the middle of the show and is followed by a closing MHSAA "Perspective."
Listen to this week's show by Clicking Here.
Past editions
November 10: Lansing Catholic cross country runner Olivia Theis, 30 years of MHSAA Football Playoff memories - Listen
November 3: Traverse City West golfer Anika Dy, perps and vics in high school sports - Listen
October 27: Pinckney football's Marcus Ford, MHSAA's evolving record book - Listen
October 20: Retired Menominee football coach Ken Hofer and Farmington Hills Harrison football coach John Harrington - Listen
October 13: Sturgis girls golf, Homecomings and another sign of the apocalypse in youth sports - Listen
October 6: Portage Central soccer's Minh Le, college basketball’s shoe scandal - Listen
September 29: Lincoln Alcona soccer keeper Conner McCoy, sportsmanship on the soccer field and cross country course - Listen
September 22: Pontiac Notre Dame Prep's Maddy Chinn, the business that is youth sports - Listen
September 15: Helpful directions in cross country, why sportsmanship resonates - Listen
September 8: Watervliet quarterback Zach Pickens, "High School Football Night" in America - Listen
September 1: Mount Pleasant Sacred Heart girls cross country, correcting a report on the health of Michigan high school football - Listen
August 25: 2016-17 head injury report, return of official Steve Johnson - Listen
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NFHS Voice: Emphasis on Education
January 20, 2020
By Karissa Niehoff
NFHS Executive Director
Sometimes, numbers or statistics in sports can be misleading or perhaps even meaningless. Often, they simply do not tell the whole story.
Such was not the case, however, with the massive number of 10,000,000 announced last week by the NFHS. As in 10 million online education courses that have been taken by high school coaches, administrators, officials, students, parents, performing arts educators and others since the inception of the NFHS Learning Center in 2007.
When we talk about the difference between education-based sports within our nation’s high schools versus out-of-school club sports, this says it all. And the quest for more continues to rise each year.
After starting with 15,000 courses in 2007, more and more people have utilized the Learning Center (www.NFHSLearn.com) on computers, tablets and smartphones. The number of courses jumped to 200,000 by 2010 and 1,071,000 by 2015 and almost two million (1,975,000) last year.
While there are now more than 70 courses available through the NFHS Learning Center, including more than 35 that are offered at no cost, the runaway success story has been the free Concussion in Sports course that was launched in 2010 and updated in 2018.
With more than five million Concussion in Sports courses delivered in almost 10 years, the NFHS has been the leader in concussion recognition and management. This course teaches how to recognize a suspected concussion. It provides protocols to manage a suspected concussion. It provides steps to help players return to play safely after a concussion.
As a result of educational initiatives such as the Concussion in Sports course, and NFHS playing rules in all high school sports that contain guidelines for management of an athlete who exhibits signs and symptoms of a concussion, to the creation of concussion laws in every state, there are positive trends in concussion rates.
And that leads to some more meaningful numbers.
Data from the National High School Sports-Related Injury Surveillance Study released late last year indicated that concussion rates during football practices dropped from 5.47 to 4.44 concussions per 10,000 athletic exposures between the 2013-14 and 2017-18 seasons. Repeat concussion rates across all sports declined from 0.47 to 0.28 per 10,000 exposures during the same time period.
The annual increase in the number of individuals taking education courses on the Learning Center, which also includes the popular free courses Heat Illness Prevention and Sudden Cardiac Arrest, indicates – at least in part – the insatiable desire on the part of parents to determine the actual risk of playing contact sports.
And more and more when it comes to football – this country’s most popular contact sport – we believe the inherent risk has never been lower.
From the youth level where USA Football has created the Football Development Model to reduce contact and teach fundamentals in a progressive manner, to the educational initiatives of the NFHS to reduce injury risk in high school sports, the focus on player safety has never been higher.
And one more important number. We believe this continual rise in the number of people taking online education courses will have an additional benefit – a growing number of high school students competing in education-based sports and activity programs.
Dr. Karissa L. Niehoff is in her second year as executive director of the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) in Indianapolis, Indiana. She is the first female to head the national leadership organization for high school athletics and performing arts activities and the sixth full-time executive director of the NFHS, which celebrated its 100th year of service during the 2018-19 school year. She previously was executive director of the Connecticut Association of Schools-Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference for seven years.