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Coaching Advancement

March 21, 2014

Over the past nine months we have marched down the field in our effort to enhance the health and safety preparation of those who coach school sports. There have been two big plays during this offensive drive.

Last May, the Representative Council adopted the requirement beginning in 2014-15 that all assistant and subvarsity high school coaches must complete the same rules/risk management session as high school varsity head coaches, or, in the alternative, complete one of several free, online health and safety programs posted for this purpose on MHSAA.com.

Last December, the Council adopted the requirement beginning in 2015-16 that all high school varsity head coaches must have current certification in CPR. 

It’s my hope that we will not fumble now that we’re in the red zone, that we won’t drop the ball before crossing the goal line on this current health and safety drive focusing on enhanced preparation of coaches.

The next play the Representative Council is considering is to require that all persons hired for the first time at any MHSAA member high school as a varsity level head coach must have completed the Coaches Advancement Program Level 1 or 2. 

More than 10,000 people already have done so; and other people who want to be high school varsity head coaches have more than two years to complete this requirement.

Finishing this drive won’t put Michigan’s high school coaching standards at the head of the class; but it will keep us in the classroom of best practices for coaches education. The standard of care is advancing nationwide and on all levels of sports.

Our Tools

March 11, 2014

MHSAA staff does very many things, including these two tasks: (1) we use the tools we have; and (2) we strive to develop more effective tools.

The tools we have are limited. We don’t have a huge staff to conduct investigations. We don’t have subpoena power to coerce disclosure of testimony and documents. We don’t have rules to cover every situation.

Thus, it feels like some people get away with things; and sometimes they do. We don’t have the tools to catch them or convict them. That is the inescapable condition of every voluntary statewide athletic association in the US.

But the other thing we do is keep working on better tools. Rules with broader reach and/or fewer holes. Penalties that are a greater deterrent to some people, and more punitive to others when deterrence doesn’t work.

Developing new rules is a tough process. Sometimes it takes months or years to get membership buy-in. Sometimes the “no-brainers,” so-called “easy solutions,” get shot down by lawyers who demand the most narrow remedy to each and every excruciatingly detailed problem.

We work today with the tools we’ve been given through the democratic processes of our voluntary association. And we keep working on ways to sharpen and strengthen those tools in ways that are reasonable in breadth and depth, rationally related to the basic tenets of a voluntary association, one of which is local control. Obviously, these are two of the more difficult things we do.