This Week in High School Sports: 9/1/17

August 31, 2017

This latest edition of "This Week In High School Sports" features the reigning champion Mount Pleasant Sacred Heart girls cross country team, addresses a rules change regarding onside kicks in football and concludes with an "MHSAA Perspective" that explains away an incorrect report on the health of Michigan high school football.

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
August 25: 2016-17 head injury report, return of official Steve Johnson - Listen

Youth Sports: 'Focus on the End User'

August 24, 2018

By Geoff Kimmerly
Second Half editor

As we at the MHSAA work toward promoting the benefits of a multi-sport experience at the high school level, we – with our Multi-Sport Task Force – realize these messages will be most valuable when they reach parents of children at the youth levels.

Below is an 18-minute TEDx talk by Travis Dorsch, a former kicker and punter at Purdue University and with multiple NFL teams who went on to receive his doctorate from Purdue and currently serves as an assistant professor at Utah State. He has conducted significant study on children’s youth sport participation and its impacts particularly on family relationships. 

In this talk, he speaks on proper expectations for young athletes and how financial costs of youth sports have twisted those expectations.

Dorsch will speak at the 6th Annual Kristen Marie Gould Endowed Lecture on Sport for Children and Youth on Sept. 6 at Michigan State University. He will be lecturing on “From Sandlot to Stadium: What We Know, What We Don't, and Best Practices for Parent Involvement in Youth Sport.”