Championship Comments
April 23, 2013
Tom Lang wrote for the Lansing State Journal on April 5, 2013, about our most recent four-time MHSAA wrestling champion who, in keeping with our policy of not naming students in blogs, is not named here.
What really makes me want to name the Fowlerville senior heavyweight is that, in Lang’s article, the four-time champ freely names his practice partners over the years and credits them for his success.
With maturity and humility uncharacteristic of athletes twice his age, our newest of 17 four-time champs said: “I definitely had some great practice partners who were beating me up;” and he named five of them who he said “were all great practice partners for me. They were quicker so I had to make sure I stayed in good position and worked a lot on speed and more fluid technique.”
This senior, who pinned every opponent he faced this past season continued: “A lot of people might have been four-time state champs but they get one injury and that ruins it. Four years can be looked at as a very short time, but that’s a long time with wrestling and how you can face injury. There seems to be a lot of knee torqueing and shoulder injuries, the joints – and it really wears at you going four years in high school. It can be brutal on the body. So just staying healthy four years so you get a chance, is just the start.”
Giving credit to good partners and good luck. I’m thinking this young man already knows much more about life than wrestling.
Loss of Innocence
May 30, 2014
Last school year we were criticized for not looking before we leapt to the conclusion that some international transfer students at several schools were not eligible, and for ruling them ineligible for the then maximum allowable period of one calendar year.
In several cases – both school employees and others – told us that the students weren’t good basketball players, notwithstanding that it was people with interests in basketball who brought the students to our state, and that those people and others with basketball interests lobbied hard on the students’ behalf.
It turned out, almost without exception, those who appealed most ardently for the eligibility of an international transfer student actually had the least appealing cases.
In the case of one student, we discovered an online video made a year earlier, taped while the student was still abroad, touting his height and demonstrating his basketball ability. Not about basketball, you say?
In another case where “basketball was not the issue,” a student later committed to play basketball for an NCAA Division I basketball program in 2014-15. He went from “mediocre” to the Mid-American Conference without ever playing his senior season of high school?
We were criticized during 2013-14 for being too suspicious, but the results of 2013-14 will make us even more suspicious in 2014-15.
Fortunately, the MHSAA will have a more complete set of tools to address transfer students this fall than it has had at any time in its history; and after what has been happening in recent years, people seem ready – even impatient – for the MHSAA to be enabled to move with more might when students – either international or domestic – transfer for athletic reasons.