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Committee Work

January 6, 2015

The winter months are the busiest for MHSAA committees, especially for those that must review or prepare recommendations for changes for the following school year.

Each year, up to 20 MHSAA committees consider proposals for Representative Council action relative to MHSAA tournament policies or procedures or Handbook regulations or interpretations.

During school year 2014-15, wherever applicable, the committees are being asked to address health and safety issues as well as policies and procedures relative to subvarsity and junior high/middle school students; and as a result of positive 2014 Update Meeting Opinion Poll responses, each sport committee is being asked to respond during calendar year 2015 and beyond to several concepts for MHSAA tournament seeding.

MHSAA committees are dominated by coaches, but they are not a rubber stamp for proposals that proceed from that sport’s high school coaches association. The difference of opinion often results from the committee seeing things differently than a coaches association leadership that the committee believes is not representative of schools of diverse size, location and demographics.

It is appropriate for committees to ask: Who was not in the room when this recommendation was drafted? Who will not be served well by this change?

When committees go through this process, they tend to reduce the quantity but improve the quality of recommendations to the Representative Council, which increases the percentage of recommendations the Council adopts.

Standards Promote Value

October 29, 2012

I can’t speak for every state, but it is probably true for most states, that (1) no school is required to provide a program of interscholastic activities – such are not curricular activities; and (2) participation in voluntary interscholastic competitive activities is a privilege offered to those who meet standards of eligibility and conduct of the school and standards of ability for the activity involved.

It is not a liability but an asset of competitive interscholastic activities that they are not co-curricular, but extracurricular – voluntary programs with extra standards, extra requirements, extra expectations.

We don’t need to sell the public on the value of participation; they desperately want their children to participate, and they will even sue us for the opportunity.  What we have to do is sell the public on the value of the standards we maintain for participation.

Much of the value of school activities results from the standards of school activities.  Many of the benefits of school activities accrue from the requirements of school activities.  Raise the bar, raise the value.  Lower the bar, lower the value.

Activities are much less capable of doing good things for kids and good things for schools and their communities where there are lower standards of eligibility and conduct.  It’s the difference between interscholastic and intramural, between tough and easy.  It is because schools have raised the bar for interscholastic activities that these programs have value to students, schools and communities.