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Football’s Future

March 20, 2012

Many folks, including me, will too often focus on the destination more than the trip.  More on results than process.  The end more than the means.

This is epidemic in sports, on all levels.  There’s so much focus on the postseason that it overshadows the regular season.

In contrast, in educational athletics, we are supposed to hold to the principle that opportunities for teaching and learning are as plentiful, maybe more so, in regular season as in tournaments, at subvarsity levels as at varsity, during practices as during games.

This disease affects football as much as any high school sport.  There’s been too much focus on the end of the season – playoffs.  Postseason tournaments have been the demise of many great Thanksgiving Day high school football classics across the country.  Playoffs continue to ruin rivalries and collapse conferences nationwide.

And, disturbingly, the focus on the end of the season misses what is most wrong with football, and may be most threatening to its future.  It’s practice.  Specifically, what’s allowed during preseason practice and then at practice throughout the season.

We can predict that, in high school football’s future, two-a-day practices will be fewer, practice hours will be shorter and activities will be different. Among proposals we will be presented (and should seriously consider) will be:

  • Increasing the number of days without pads at the start of the season from three days to four or even five.
  • Prohibiting two-a-day practices entirely, or at least on consecutive days.
  • Limiting the number of minutes of practice on any one day.
  • Restricting contact drills to a certain number of minutes each week.

If this all sounds silly or radical, remember that the NCAA and NFL are already making such changes.  NFL players face contact in practice on only 14 days during a 17-week regular season.  Meanwhile, many high school coaches have kids knocking heads and bruising bodies two to four days a week, all season long.  Giving critics the impression that interscholastic football for teens is more brutal than the higher levels of football for grown men.  Inviting interference from people who think they know better.

Actually, we know better; and we need to do better.  Soon.

Not In School Sports

June 5, 2015

When those involved in high-profile major college sports offer advice to us in lower profile but perhaps higher principled school sports, we can quickly lose our patience.

Why, for example, would we ever listen to scheduling suggestions for high school basketball from the higher level that schedules games every day of the week, at any time of the week, anywhere on this continent or another?

These behaviors in major college basketball describe an athletic program that is orphaned from the academic mission of the colleges and universities to which they increasingly have become disconnected. We can’t let that happen to school sports.

Major college athletics is in an “arms war” of escalating costs for extravagant facilities and exorbitant coaches’ salaries. Blinded by their own ballooning budgets, college folks’ foolish suggestions for more frequent and distant high school games would increase the operational costs in the athletic departments of struggling and sometimes bankrupt school districts. We can’t let that happen in school sports.

Only when major college sports gets its house in much better order will any of its people earn the slightest right to suggest new policies and procedures for school sports. For now, much of what we see in high-profile college sports shows us what we should not do, not what we should do, in high school sports.