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Adversity

January 25, 2012

It’s been said that adversity causes some people to break and others to break records.

Author Keith McFarland spent seven years studying the performance of 7,000 companies, after which he made this pronouncement:  “The top performers had one thing in common.  Each went through a period of pronounced difficulty – often serious enough to threaten the firm’s existence.”

McFarland continued in The Breakthrough Company:  “Great companies, I discovered, arise not from the absence of difficulty but from its vortex,” its whirly mass.

The key during tough times, according to McFarland, is not to focus on survival, but instead to ask fundamental questions, to face facts that might have gone overlooked in more prosperous times, and to identify and integrate the new knowledge and insights that adversity can bring.

Schools and school sports, today in the vortex of adversity, may actually do more than merely survive our present difficulties if we too examine obstacles and opportunities previously overlooked, and then make positive use of the lessons that sometimes only adversity can bring.

A Scottish author of the 19th century with the optimistic name Samuel Smiles wrote:  “The very greatest things – great thoughts, discoveries, inventions – have usually been nurtured in hardship, often pondered over in sorrow, and at length established with difficulty.”

Centennial Celebration

October 20, 2017

The National Federation of State High School Associations is preparing to celebrate its 100th year of service during the 2018-19 school year. It may be unfair to boil down to a few bullet points a century of contributions to school sports, but I make the attempt here – with the credentials that there has been a John E. Roberts heading up a National Federation member state organization for more than 60 of those years (my dad in Wisconsin for nearly 30 years, followed by my more than 31 years in Michigan).

Here, in my opinion, are the four greatest gifts of the National Federation to school sports in America:

  • In the late 1920s and 1930s, the National Federation’s leadership influenced the end of national high school tournaments. First four, then a dozen and then two dozen very young state high school associations, through their even younger National Federation, successfully challenged prestigious universities (like the University of Chicago) and the biggest names in college sports (like Amos Alonzo Stagg) who conducted national high school tournaments.

  • During the next decades, and one sport at a time, the National Federation assumed from the colleges and non-school organizations responsibility for writing the playing rules for high school level competition, intentionally crafting rules that promoted greater participant safety and much more ease of understanding and enforcement by contest officials. The National Federation now releases about 40 publications each year, serving 16 different sports.

  • At the start of the new millennium, the National Federation began its march to emerge as the nation’s most prolific provider of online education for coaches. The National Federation now has more than 50 different online courses available, including more than 20 free courses; and approximately five million courses have been delivered.

  • In 2013, the NFHS Network was launched to provide a digital broadcast home for state high school association tournaments and the School Broadcast Program. With more than 3,000 events produced each month now, this is the most effective platform in National Federation history for promoting the excitement, diversity and values of school-sponsored sports.