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Football Practice Proposals

June 11, 2013

During 2013, a Football Task Force has been working on revisions to practice policies that might simultaneously improve acclimatization of players and reduce head trauma. Over three meetings, the following four-part recommendation has been developed:

  1. During the first week of practice of the season, only helmets are allowed the first two days, only shoulder pads may be added on the third and fourth days, and full pads may not be worn until the fifth day of team practice.
  2. Before the first regular-season game, schools may not schedule more than one “collision” practice in a day.
    • A “collision” practice is one in which there is live, game-speed, player-vs.-player contact in pads (not walk-throughs).
    • During any additional practice sessions that day, players may wear helmets and other pads (neither is mandatory). Blocking and tackling technique may be taught and practiced. However, contact is limited to players vs. pads, shields, sleds or dummies.
  3. After the first regular-season game, teams may conduct no more than two collision practice days in any week, Monday through Sunday. During other days of practice, players may wear helmets and other protective pads (neither is mandatory). Blocking and tackling technique may be taught and practiced.  However, contact is limited to players vs. pads, shields, sleds or dummies.
  4. No single practice may exceed three hours, and the total practice time for days with multiple practice sessions may not exceed five hours.
    • Warm-up, stretching, speed and agility drills and cool down are all considered part of practice. Neither strength/weight training activities nor classroom sessions are considered practice for the purposes of the three- or five-hour limits.

MHSAA staff will be taking this recommendation on the road from now through October to obtain constituent understanding and feedback. It is the intent of the Task Force to finalize its consensus regarding these matters by late November so they may be reviewed by the Michigan High School Football Coaches Association, the MHSAA Football Committee and at the MHSAA League Leadership meeting prior to Representative Council action in March 2014.

The Next Big Thing

February 16, 2016

The full-time athletic director, without a lot of other duties and with support for clerical matters as well as event supervision, is a situation rarely seen in secondary schools today. That’s bad for students, schools and school sports.

Today, typically the athletic director’s job is divided among many areas of a school’s operations. And when a veteran athletic director retires, moves up or otherwise moves on, it is typical that the “replacement” is an inexperienced person who is given even more to do with less time to do it.

So, when I asked the MHSAA Representative Council in December to talk about and commit to writing what it believes is the “next big thing” the MHSAA should be doing, it was not surprising to me that the consensus was this: “We should be conducting much more Athletic Director In-Service training, both in person and electronically, for both new ADs and veterans; and we shouldn’t shy away from a ‘back-to basics’ approach, with testing.”

The theme of the responses of Representative Council members in December was that as schools are becoming increasingly under-resourced, the MHSAA must do more. Clearly, the Representative Council (as a group) has lower expectations for what schools can do for themselves, and higher expectations for what the MHSAA should be doing to help schools. If there is a worry in all this, it is that the Representative Council is losing confidence in the principle of “institutional control,” and the Council sees the need to place increasing demands on the MHSAA to train, oversee and actually do things that would have been an overreach of our proper role 20 or even 10 years ago.

The transformational idea here – I don’t like it, but perhaps it’s unavoidable – is that the MHSAA must do more because of the reality that overburdened, under-resourced school personnel can only do less. And, if we fail to do more, school sports will continue to create problems for itself, and worse, continue to drift to a point where school sports are barely distinguishable from non-school sports programs.

We are seeing building athletic directors less engaged in the administration of school sports and, in their place, local administrators are depending on third parties to schedule games and assign officials, or they are delegating scheduling and most administrative details to their coaches, an increasing number of whom are nonfaculty members who have more affinity to non-school sports than school sports. This isn’t just happening in skiing, golf and bowling but also in basketball and other sports.

As we inventory the controversies we’ve endured this past fall, we see that in almost every case there was a lack of knowledge or execution at the local level that created a problem which people then were all too ready to blame the MHSAA for. The policy or the organization gets criticized for an individual’s deficient attention or action at the local level. And every controversy is a distraction – it gets in the way of our work, and it adversely affects our ability to convey a positive message about the important role of educational athletics in the lives of students, schools and society.