The Cool Thing To Do
November 9, 2012
Last year the MHSAA Student Advisory Council suggested the MHSAA conduct a “Battle of the Fans,” and under the supervision of Andy Frushour and assistance of Geoff Kimmerly, Andi Osters and other MHSAA staff, the campaign was a tremendous success.
Nineteen schools submitted applications, a process which required communication within the school district about what is and is not suitable behavior at school-sponsored events, and then a coordinated effort to produce a video of the school and its cheering section in action last winter.
These videos have been viewed on YouTube more than 25,000 times, and more than 8,500 voted on Facebook for the student section they most favored.
The result was not only better sportsmanship at these schools, it made being at the games the “cool” thing to do. Student attendance increased, and student behavior improved. A double win no matter what happened between the teams on the court.
With the attention being given to student cheering sections during the MHSAA’s 2012 regional sportsmanship summits – attracting 1,000 students from more than 100 schools at four sites during October and November – we expect dozens more schools to compete in the 2013 “Battle of the Fans” – building up student cheering sections, guiding students in positive ways and producing videos that try to convince Facebook voters and Student Advisory Council judges that theirs is the best student support group among MHSAA member schools.
Our Open Tournament
April 15, 2016
One of the criticisms we hear as a result of not seeding the MHSAA Girls and Boys Basketball Tournaments is that it doesn’t allow the best teams to avoid one another until later rounds of the tournament and often leads to anticlimactic Semifinal and Final games.
But, after spending thousands of hours and perhaps a million dollars to seed its Division I men’s basketball tournament, the NCAA had a 17-point mismatch when a No. 10 seed met a No. 1 seed in one national semifinal and a 44-point blowout between a pair of so-called No. 2 seeds in the other national semifinal.
Seeding is such an imperfect art, and teams can play so unpredictably from one day to the next in a one-and-done tournament, that seeding is more of a publicity stunt than it is a science on which to structure a tournament.
To send a team and its fans packing to distant venues on the basis of its winning percentage and margins of victory relative to other teams is not responsible policy at the high school level. It could be unsound fiscally and unsound educationally.
Our high schools enjoy a format that allows every high school entry into the MHSAA’s postseason tournament every year. If we were to limit our tournament to only 68 teams like the NCAA, seeding might be more practical. But as long as we accommodate 750 high schools in our Boys Basketball Tournament and 750 in our Girls Basketball Tournament, geographical districts with blind draws may be most appropriate.
The NCAA tournament, like so much of major college sports, caters to the few and most fortunate; so maybe seeding is good in that environment. But our high school basketball tournaments are open to all schools, and they require we make different decisions to serve those schools.