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Baby Steps

April 8, 2014

Two first, small steps have been taken in the direction of making school-sponsored sports for junior high/middle school-age athletes more attractive to these students and their parents.

Next school year, MHSAA member junior high/middle schools have the option to increase the length of quarters in basketball from six minutes to a maximum of eight minutes and to increase the length of quarters in football from eight minutes to a maximum of ten minutes.

In late March, the MHSAA Representative Council approved these recommendations of the MHSAA Basketball and Football Committees which had favorable reaction also from the MHSAA Junior High/Middle School Committee and from the Junior High/Middle School Task Force which is meeting throughout 2014 to bring special attention to long languishing issues of policy and programming for students prior to high school.

It is hoped that the up to eight additional minutes in school-sponsored basketball and football contests will allow more students to get playing time in more games, and we fully expect that it will also mean more playing time in all games for some students. Both are needed for school sports to be competitive in the youth sports marketplace.

These may have been among the easiest decisions the Representative Council will face as the Junior High/Middle School Task Force works its way through many tougher topics during 2014 when, in many cases, societal trends will confront sacred cows.

Making an Impact

September 11, 2012

Here’s a provocative statement by David Gergen, professor of public policy and director of the Center for Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and a frequent political analyst for CNN:  “The nonprofits making the greatest impacts these days are entrepreneurial, adaptive, outward-looking, and sometimes a little messy.”

I like that, and I think using these four features or criteria to evaluate the MHSAA now and in the mid-range future would be good for those we serve.

  • Are we entrepreneurial?  How could we be more so?

  • Are we adaptive?  Are we flexible in how we do things?

  • Are we outward-looking?  Are we impacting school sports broadly and deeply?  Does the impact have staying power?  Are schools better because of what we do?  Are communities stronger for our doing it?

  • Are we sometimes a little messy?

I suspect that if we are the first three – entrepreneurial, adaptive and outward-looking – then messiness is a natural byproduct.  There will be starts and stops, failures before successes, changes.  There will be disagreements and compromises.

I suspect that we will have to tolerate a little more messiness if we are to move forward, even faster than we have, and if we are to have impact, even greater than we have.