THE PURPLE COW
(This Title is Borrowed from the Book "Purple Cow:
Transform your Business by Being Remarkable" by Seth Godin)

This message is about two topics, unrelated to one another, but similar in this respect: they threaten the future of school sports. They threaten the place that sports has in schools and the niche that school sports has in society.

The first topic is local: decisions that have been made at the local level about sports funding and management. The second is national: pressures being applied at the national level to promote national high school championships.
In more than a dozen small ways for more than a dozen years, the leaders of school sports have been giving up leadership of local programs. We have been transferring responsibilities to non-school entities.

For example, when we drop 7th- and 8th-grade programs, when we turn to nonfaculty coaches for our school programs, when we resort to non-school funding for these programs, when we utilize non-school personnel to assign officials, and even when we sponsor cooperative programs between schools for sports teams, the lines between school and community get fuzzy. The fuzzier these lines get, the less the public will see need for sports as a part of schools; and the less sports are a part of schools, the less schools will have sports as a tool for reaching and motivating students in schools, as well as community interest and support for schools.

And now we have participation fees. Typically, one of the differences between school teams and community teams is that ours is free, theirs is not. So again, with participation fees, we blur the line of what makes us special and unique.
We have to be on guard, if it's not too late already, that little changes don't accumulate into a big shift from school to community control of our programs.

The second issue that fundamentally threatens the place of sports in schools and the niche that school sports has in society is the movement toward national high school championships.

Certainly there are some events for schools from multiple states. There are also some non-school events for school age athletes from many states. But there is nothing close to a national high school championship. Some in the National Federation of State High School Associations want to change that.

None of what is currently occurring seriously affects high schools or students in Michigan. None of what is currently occurring threatens the nature of educational athletics in Michigan. What does threaten our programs is National Federation sponsorship of national high school championships, making national championships official and approved, making national schedules and travel usual and expected.

There are a host of practical problems, beyond the philosophical objections, to national high school championships. Cost. Loss of classroom instructional time. Overlap of seasons. Different seasons. Different ending dates to coinciding seasons. Different eligibility rules. Different contest maximums. Increased specialization. Increased commercialization. Diminishing of state high school championships, and further diminishing of regular season local programs. And more.
In response to these two threats, as well as the LeBron James circus during 2002-03, the MHSAA has launched a program that some would call a branding campaign but is merely an effort to define ourselves so others do not. It's an effort to say old things in a new way. It's an effort to distinguish ourselves from sports on all other levels by all other sponsors.

The NCAA and professional leagues speak of branding. Those groups brand themselves; we define ourselves. They spend countless dollars on branding strategies; we spend countless hours making a distinction between them and us.
Our mission is different: not entertainment, but education. Our message is different: team more than individual; character-building more than winning. They will market a game between the Lakers and the Rockets as Shaq versus Yao Ming, while we will focus on the team and on the values of teamwork and hard work, promoting loyalty and school spirit, teaching leadership and sportsmanship.

Schools will try to give equal attention to star and substitute, varsity and subvarsity, revenue-producing and non-revenue-producing sport, boys and girls programs. We market the multiple-sport opportunity at the local level, not specialization and national competition.

We are the "purple cow" in a pasture full of black and white cows that are otherwise indistinguishable, one from another. We are the remarkably different athletic program, the noticeable one. If we try to complete with the glitz and glamour of college and professional sports, we fail miserably. If we try to be like every other community program that travels the nation or globe but gets barely a blurb in our newspapers, we will lose our place altogether.

With cheerleaders, pep bands, yellow buses and motorcades, pep assemblies and comprehensive coverage on radio and television – and none of this found in non-school sports – we have the upper hand by far. Unlike every other sport program that seems to have another level after the state title, there is nowhere to go after the high school championship. It's the top, the end . . . the qualifier to nothing else . . . the pinnacle of what a high school team can do. Why would we give up all of this for a national high school tournament?

We need to be the purple cow. We need to be the remarkable program, the one different from all the others. That is our charm, that is our place, and that is our future.

— John E. "Jack" Roberts
MHSAA Executive Director