Increasing numbers of schools are having increasing difficulties completing varsity football schedules, citing the unwillingness of schools with similar enrollments within reasonable travel distances . . .
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Times were that the appearance of several foreign exchange students on the roster of a Michigan high school team created controversy and hard feelings.
Here, from Muskegon-based Education Action Group in late August, is a different route to the same opinion we have about participation fees – so-called “pay-for-play.”
Several times each week that the Michigan Legislature is in session, our legislative liaison office sends the MHSAA and its other clients a list of new bills that have been introduced. And I alternate between being depressed and infuriated with what I read.
After four seasons on a voluntary basis, in 1997, the MHSAA adopted a mandatory weight monitoring program with a nutrition education component for interscholastic wrestling . . . A remaining point of contention is the “home weigh-in” option for schools during the regular season.
When my wife was going through items her 89-year-old mother had kept prior to her death, she discovered a yellow butterfly-shaped ashtray my wife had made as a Brownie in the 1950s. Can you imagine that? We had young girls making ashtrays!
An essential characteristic of school-sponsored sports programs is that student-athletes earn the privilege of participation on their school teams by maintaining adequate academic progress in their schools’ classrooms.
Each October for 32 consecutive years, the MHSAA has hosted a series of meetings across the state called “Update Meetings,” an opportunity for school representatives to review recent changes as well as proposals for change that are working their way through the organization’s governing structure.
That football is a more popular spectator sport than gardening has many obvious explanations. One of the less obvious but more compelling reasons may be discovered in this quote from Michael Pollan’s Second Nature – A Gardener’s Education:
America’s daily newspapers are struggling to stay in business. Some have been reduced in size; some in frequency. Some have ceased print versions and are only found online; some have ceased to exist altogether.
When lists are compiled of the benefits of participation in school sports, almost always included is that sports provide practical, real-life leadership lessons for many participants. Can we be sure about that?
It was late August. All the school district’s professional and paraprofessional staff were gathered in the high school cafeteria. And in the hallways walked groups of students.
A concern for school sports resulting from the underfunding of schools, which began long before our state’s current economic recession, is that desperation will drive many schools to do long-term if not permanent damage to interscholastic athletics.
Coaches tell their athletes to keep their heads in the game. They want their teams mentally alert, sharp and thinking about their responsibilities during each play or event.
Every year in August, my wife and I go blueberry picking in West Michigan. Two buckets, placed in four freezer bags, from which we make withdrawals for pancakes, muffins and sauces throughout the next 12 months.
Building a successful and reputable school sports program within the framework of rules and regulations is a high goal for administrators and coaches alike in our line of work.
I’m told the water levels of the Great Lakes are affected more by what we don’t see than what we do see, or what seems most apparent.
Next month the MHSAA will host a professionally facilitated “study circle” to begin to analyze and search for solutions to several issues that make the interscholastic tennis experience less than we would like it to be for students and their sponsoring schools.
If life were perfect in Michigan school sports, we would accomplish these two objectives every year . . .
Obesity has pulled away from a group of concerns vying for the runner-up spot among 23 different health concerns...
. . . it may seem surprising to some folks that at almost the same time that the MHSAA is making these electronic advances, it is also launching a new print publication.
It was readily apparent to regular visitors to MHSAA.com that the MHSAA’s website had a redesigned look and navigation system when it launched at the start of August.
The surprising results of new studies about an old topic reveal an ongoing concern in youth sports.
The national rules committee for high school softball is moving pitchers a few steps further from home plate. Effective for school year 2010-11, the pitching rubber must be 43 feet from home – three feet further.
Thanks to problems in professional sports, steroids stay in our sports news headlines. And sometimes the problems of the pros become confused with the problems of schools.
As high school football programs kick off their 2009 seasons this week, some schools are also looking to 2010 when the MHSAA may add an eight-player division to its Football Playoffs for those Class D schools which are struggling to start or maintain 11-player programs.
Some high school sports remain for many years under the radar of the public’s passion, unless you participate or are the parent of a participant. Then some event or series of events has everyone talking. That’s how it is with high school swimming and diving.
In any successful enterprise, some time will be devoted to trying to learn what the customer wants. In school sports, there are many diverse customers, but none more important than the student-athlete.
One of the certainties of these uncertain economic times is that more people register to officiate school sports in bad times than in good.
For the first time in history, all MHSAA tournament sports – including football, which started practice yesterday and the rest of the fall sports which can begin practice tomorrow – have a minimum number of days of team practice before the first interscholastic contest.
For more than 23 years we’ve been taking some space in MHSAA publications and some time in the busy days of readers for editorials to which I affix my name. These editorials are intended as much to provoke thinking as to report fact.