A milestone is an opportunity to look back, and we’ll surely dip into our history plenty during the 2024-25 school year as the Michigan High School Athletic Association celebrates 100 years of educational athletics.

But an anniversary of this magnitude also provides an ideal opportunity – at an ideal time in MHSAA history – to explain how we provide opportunities for students to participate in sports, and why that work remains vital.

Beginning next week and continuing through our final championship events next spring, we’ll be telling several of these stories as part of our “Century of School Sports” series on MHSAA.com.

School sports have advanced significantly over the last century, of course, but the values we strive to teach in educational athletics have remained consistent – and we’ll detail several of those efforts and how they’ve evolved over the years. There also are more high achievers and difference-makers worthy of recognition than we could ever highlight even during a year-long quest. But we will do our best to tell you about as many as possible.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson we at the East Lansing office learned during the COVID-19 pandemic is that school sports are just as meaningful to communities all over Michigan, and despite any perceived notion they are being pushed to the background by the multitude of non-school sports options that have sprouted over the last few decades.

We care about them enough to make them our life’s work – and we’re excited to tell many stories of what’s been, what we enjoy today and perhaps what’s to come for the next million student-athletes who will learn lifelong lessons studying in our extension of the classroom.