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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.

A Meaning-Driven Brand

June 5, 2012

One of the apparent conclusions of the MHSAA online “Have Your Say” opinion poll conducted five years ago that continues to guide us today, is that the character of school sports is key to the appeal of school sports.  This is true for both sponsoring school personnel and for those participants and spectators regularly involved in school sports.  This suggests that to keep our core customers, we must preserve our core characteristics.  That whatever changes occur in school styles and structures, we must maintain by our policies and programs the features and values which our core customers have experienced and both want and expect to continue.

It may sometimes feel that we are swimming against the current of public opinion when we enforce rules that define student eligibility or the limits of competition and travel, but the development and implementation of such restrictions might be essential to the expectations of our core constituents for the experience they remember for themselves and want for their children or team.

Just because schools change, it is not necessary that rules of school sports change as well.  Sometimes, perhaps.  But not always or even often.  Leadership must always consider the program without a rule before we do away with the rule.

It is not too strong to state that schools seek MHSAA membership precisely because there are rules.  In fact, schools formed the MHSAA to be their vehicle for making and enforcing rules.  Just as participation by students is more valuable to them and their schools where standards of eligibility and conduct are higher, so is membership by schools in an organization more valuable where such standards are developed and enforced.

The Culting of Brands is a good book with a bad title in which author Douglas Atkin writes about the success of “a meaning-driven brand.”  He says, “The product carries the message and then becomes it.”  These kinds of brands, he says, are really beliefs.  “They have morals – embody values.”  They “stand up for things.  They work hard; fight for what is right.”

Ultimately, it is exactly this that is expected of the high school brand of competitive athletics in Michigan.