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 Game Changer
July 9, 2012
In the year 2000, fewer than 300,000 books were published in the United States. In 2010, more than a million were published.
This means that electronic media didn’t kill the book publishing industry, as some experts predicted. Quite the opposite. But electronic media surely changed the industry in several major ways, including:
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It democricized the industry – made it cheaper and easier for almost all of us to publish whatever we want, whenever we want, even if only our family and closest friends might read it.
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It dumbed down the industry. With almost everybody able to produce almost anything, the average quality of published works has plummeted.
The importance of these book industry statistics to us is that they point to what can and does happen in other aspects of life, including school sports. They provide evidence that sometimes what we think might crush us, only changes us. Causes us to do things differently – cheaper, faster or better and, sometimes, all three at once.
Some of us in school sports may, sometimes, curse electronic media; but many of the changes they have brought us are positive. Like officials registering online, receiving game assignments online and filing reports online. Like schools rating officials online; and online rules meetings for coaches and officials. Like schools scheduling games online, and spectators submitting scores online. Like the ArbiterGame scheduling program the MHSAA is now providing all its member high schools free of charge.