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Battle of the Fans

March 27, 2012

Guests at the MHSAA Girls and Boys Basketball Tournaments at Michigan State University’s Breslin Center the past two weekends saw the result of the MHSAA’s first “Battle of the Fans.”  The idea came from the MHSAA’s Student Advisory Council, and it spread through social media.  Read about it here.

We embraced this idea of our Student Advisory Council because a “Battle of the Fans” is something we can do, and most other youth sports cannot.  In the world of youth sports, fans are almost unique to school sports.  Fans aren’t found at AAU tournaments or US Soccer Development Academies like they are at school sports events.

We embraced this idea because fans are a part of what defines school sports and makes high school sports different than other youth sports, and makes interscholastic athletics a tradition in the United States like nowhere else in the world.

We embraced this idea because some people say that high school sports attendance is down and school spirit is declining.  This initiative demonstrates that is not true everywhere, and doesn’t need to be true anywhere.  It can help to motivate better spirit in more schools.

We embraced this idea to get more people talking about what is and is not good sportsmanship, and to encourage students to reengage in school events in more positive ways.  This should make for more and even better competition, and dialogue, in 2013.

A Can-Do Response

January 5, 2015

Michigan has a tradition of some of the nation’s most lenient out-of-season coaching rules, especially in the summer; and yet, the few rules we have are sometimes blamed for driving students to non-school programs.

Nevertheless, there is some validity to the criticism. It is observably true that non-school programs seem to fill every void in the interscholastic calendar. The day after high school seasons end, many non-school programs begin. The day a school coach can no longer work with more than three or four students, a non-school coach begins to do so.

The challenge is to balance the negative effects of an “arms war” in high school sports against driving students toward non-school programs. It’s the balance of too few vs. too many rules out of season.

The out-of-the-box compromise for this dilemma could be to not regulate the off season as much as to conduct school-sponsored off-season programs in a healthier way than they normally occur, i.e., to move schools back in control of and in the center of the non-school season. To not merely regulate what schools and coaches can’t do, but actually run the programs they can do and want to do.

Of course, this would require more of what schools have less of – resources. School administrators who may be in agreement that schools should operate off-season programs to keep kids attached to in-season programs still balk because they lack resources. At a time when resources are being cut for basic support of in-season programs, how could they justify spending more for out-of-season outreach?

Ultimately, in discovering the sweet spot for out-of-season interaction between school coaches with student-athletes, we need to give at least as much attention to providing more opportunity for what they can do together as for what they can’t do.