Competitive Classes
May 7, 2013
After the classifications and divisions for MHSAA tournaments in 2013-14 were posted on mhsaa.com last month, there were more questions and comments than in previous years.
Some of this results from electronic media – how quickly our information gets distributed far and wide, and how easy it is for people to email their opinions. This isn’t bad.
But we were able to discern in the feedback that there is poor public understanding of school enrollment trends in Michigan. For example, many people objected that the spread between the largest and smallest schools in the classifications and divisions has grown too large.
In fact, taking the long view, the difference between the largest and smallest schools has been shrinking:
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In Class D, the difference between the largest and smallest school has trended downward over the past 25 years, and will be approximately 20 percent smaller for 2013-14 than in 1989 (to 189 from 247).
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The same is true in Class C, although less dramatically (to 221 from 259).
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The same is true in Classes B and A, although less consistently (from 496 to 464 in Class B; and from 2,111 to 1,888 in Class A).
If there is need for more than four classes in basketball or girls volleyball, or for more than four “equal divisions” in most other sports, it is not because of the reason most often cited. That reason – that the enrollment spread is growing too large – is not supported by the facts.
Lost Leaders
April 12, 2016
What’s the greatest threat to the future of school sports? It’s not concussions, for school sports are actually more safe each year, not less. It’s not a lack of civility, for our events are still the most sportsmanlike of any highly competitive sports program. It’s not cost, for school sports remain the cheapest form of organized sports to play and to watch.
Actually, the greatest threat to the future of school sports is from the self-inflicted wounds by local school district boards of education. The decisions to devalue the local high school athletic administrator. Heaping more and more duties on a person who is being given less and less time, training and support to perform those duties.
The full-time athletic administrator, with support for clerical duties and event supervision and without many other duties added on, is an increasingly rare situation in schools today. And when that person retires, moves up or otherwise moves on, it is typical that the replacement is less experienced, given even more unrelated duties to perform, and given less time in which to do them.
It’s then that the athletic director looks to coaches to run their own programs; and when the school coach is a nonfaculty person, this is a delegation of school sports to a non-school person.
Is it any wonder then that philosophies suffer, policies are ignored and problems occur?
Is it any wonder then that people who see no difference between the philosophies of school and non-school sports question why schools should spend any time at all on this aspect of adolescent development? They become all too ready to leave sports to the community.
Every shortcut to school sports administration has a consequence. Every dollar we try to squeeze from the school sports budget has a hidden higher cost. Every non-athletic duty we add to the athletic director’s day is another step closer to schools without sports.
And the secondary schools admired by the rest of the world will become ordinary.