From the MHSAA November Bulletin

I am so glad you are here!

In May of 1987, we wrote an item for the MHSAA monthly BULLETIN entitled “Raising Our Expectations.” In essence, we said that you and I have a tough choice: either to keep silent and give up on the program in which we have believed and to which we have devoted huge portions of our lives; or to speak out and attempt to raise the expectations of those involved in interscholastic athletics.

We said it is not enough that school athletics are a part of education. They must be a good part.

In October and November of 1987, the MHSAA BULLETIN ran two editorials on “The Responsibilities of Membership.” We said the first responsibility is for a member school to enforce the rules. We said its second responsibility is to protect the environment in which events are contested. Here’s the essence of what we said.

That editorial cited a 1982 book called Moralities of Everyday Life in which the authors discussed what they called “moral drift,” a process by which people waft toward goals they may not have set out to reach. They said the process involves procrastination of ideas and actions, laziness of mind and body, lack of purpose and resolve, muddled thinking and fudged intention.

The authors demonstrated through examples how ordinary people have done monstrous things by yielding responsibility for their actions and accepting as appropriate acts tomorrow what they would have rejected as bad today through a subtle, gradual process.

In that 1987 editorial, we said that the interscholastic athletic community has been following this course. It is apparent in many aspects of our programs, but it is most obvious in the sportsmanship standards we have come to tolerate at interscholastic events.
For example, isolated vulgarities from crowds, which were tolerated by school authorities or even tickled their funnybones, had evolved into organized chants of obscenities. Cheers for mistakes by opponents had evolved into spectators standing, pointing at the unfortunate soul, and shouting, “you, you, you” or “sieve, sieve, sieve” or “airball, airball.”

The drift toward unacceptable standards of conduct received at least part of its impetus from the standards allowed on other levels of sports and publicized by the media. But regardless of what is happening around us in the world of sports, we said in 1987, the members of the Michigan High School Athletic Association have the obligation to hold coaches responsible for the conduct of players, and the association has every right to hold schools accountable for the conduct of coaches and crowds. This is a responsibility of their membership in the MHSAA.

A February 1989 BULLETIN editorial was entitled “Taking Sportsmanship Higher and Farther,” in which we tried to expand the breadth and depth of our understanding of sportsmanship. To see it as more than observing a list of don’ts, but also as demanding and demonstrating a list of dos. To see sportsmanship as something that begins long before the contest starts, and lasts long after the contest ends.

Over the past decade in the MHSAA BULLETIN, we have editorialized regarding sportsmanship no fewer than ten times, and we have included two dozen guest columns from people like you: students, coaches, administrators, board members, boosters, media and officials.

But there has been a lot more than words, a lot more than education. There has been encouragement — including awards at District, Regional and Final MHSAA tournaments. There has been enforcement — rules and penalties, including the nation’s most complete definition of taunting and tough penalties for violations. And there has been exposure — including the listing of coaches who are ejected from contests, and a listing of schools which receive three or more negative officials reports during a school year.
We — all of us here — have raised expectations.

The result is that we have the best-behaved athletes on any level of sport. The high school athlete is the best-behaved athlete in Michigan. It’s ironic, and sad, that the older athletes become, the more immature they are allowed to behave in contests.
High school athletes would be ejected from this day of competition and the next if they did once what fans do routinely. We have all the rules we need to control the behavior of athletes and their coaches. We have raised those expectations; and they have been met.
Now is the time to lower our sights. To take aim, less at college and professional sports; but at the local level, targeting our individual students and citizens who have forgotten or have never known the pure purpose of interscholastic athletics. That purpose is education; and our events are classrooms, only with the volume turned up.

In other words, we need not only to raise our expectations; we need now to lower our sights. We need to influence the individual spectators and invade the homes they come from.

Sportsmanship doesn’t begin with the National Football League or the National Basketball Association or the National Hockey League. Sportsmanship doesn’t begin at the headquarters of the National Federation of State High School Associations. It doesn’t begin at the offices of the Michigan High School Athletic Association. Sportsmanship doesn’t even begin at the league level.
Sportsmanship begins at the local level and in the homes of our constituents.

I spent four years and twelve seasons as a high school athlete. Obviously, the times were a lot different then than now; but I never had a penalty in football, never a technical foul in basketball, never got cross with an umpire in baseball. Not because I was inherently good; but because my mother wouldn’t have allowed anything less.

My sons played 15 seasons of high school sports. They never got cross with an official in wrestling and they never received a yellow card, much less a red card, in soccer. Not because those boys are inherently good, but because their mother would never have allowed anything less.

So what can we do to deliver our message to our constituents’ homes — even broken homes and dysfunctional homes — and to obtain old fashioned parental reinforcement for sportsmanship? There is no one thing. What’s required is a comprehensive program of many aspects, a coordinated program involving many people, and a consistent program where we never let up.

Today’s speakers will offer component parts in general sessions this morning, in a rousing luncheon address this noon, and in smaller group sessions this afternoon. There isn’t one thing, it’s everything we do.

Why is this day important? Because sportsmanship is important. And why is sportsmanship important?
Because sportsmanship is the starting point if not the essence of good citizenship. And because it is what we’re supposed to teach in educational athletics more than anything else. We are to teach sportsmanship more than fitness, more than skills, more than strategies, more than discipline, more than sacrifice, more than hard work; we are to teach sportsmanship. That is our product.

Educational athletics without sportsmanship is like Oldsmobile without cars. We would have no reason for being.
In the book “The Discovery of Morals,” which is not about athletics at all, the author, who is a sociologist and not an athlete at all, says this: “Sportsmanship is probably the clearest and most popular expression of morals. Sportsmanship is a thing of the spirit. It is timeless and endless; and we should strive to make it universal to all races, creeds and walks in life.”

Sportsmanship is a timeless and endless expression of morals by all of us. Sportsmanship reveals more about us than anything else we do. Sportsmanship reveals more about our character than any athletic achievement, any victory, any award or trophy.

Sportsmanship is more than a list of don’ts and dos. It is more than grace in defeat and victory. It is more than how we play the game and how we watch the game. It’s how we live our lives.

Sportsmanship begins in our homes. We work on it in practice. It extends to games, reaches to the crowd, permeates the school halls and shopping malls, and it infects society for good or for bad. The quality of sportsmanship in schools is linked to the quality of citizenship in our society.

That’s why sportsmanship is important. That’s why this Summit is important. That’s why what you do after this day is important.

I am so glad you are here!