Logo

Corporate Care

March 10, 2015

One of the MHSAA’s newest corporate sponsors is arguably one of its most important ever because it will assist the MHSAA’s aspirations to go further beyond the ordinary in promoting student-athlete health and safety.

That new sponsor is Sparrow Health System, and you can read about our new relationship by clicking here.

During the many discussions with Sparrow’s leadership leading up to our partnership, we learned of its membership in the prestigious Mayo Clinic Care Network; and during our review of some of Mayo’s work we reviewed an April 2012 Mayo Clinic article about the risks of concussion in high school football.

The article presented the results of a carefully controlled study of individuals who played high school football in Rochester, Minnesota, during the decade 1946 to 1956.

The conclusion was that those participants did not have an increased risk of later developing dementia, Parkinson’s disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) compared to non-football-playing high school males. The study notes that this was the case even though, compared to today, “there was poorer equipment and less regard for concussions and no rules prohibiting head-first tackling (spearing).”

There is no small supply of data that sheds better light on the head trauma hysteria in sports in general and football in particular. We cite such data as a counter-balance, not as a reason to slow the search for safer ways to conduct school sports. Our new sponsorship is evidence that we are increasing our capacity to do much more.

News Unfiltered

July 12, 2017

During the first summer after my college graduation, I was the campaign advance man outside of the Milwaukee and Madison areas for a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin. A great job.

Sometime during that summer, I met the head of the campaign in a café. He was reading a newspaper as I arrived; and as I sat down at the table, I asked him what he was reading. I’ll always remember his response. He said, “I’m looking for what could go wrong today?”

It was the campaign manager’s job to think about worst-case scenarios and consider how the campaign might get taken off message by the news of the day.

I was young and impressionable, and I soon began to consume the daily news through the same filter.

It was not difficult to do so in the 1970s. The daily newspaper was printed and delivered to my door every day. Television had just three networks, and each provided brief news reports two or three times a day.

Today, what passes as news comes from hundreds or thousands or millions of sources and it is changing constantly, 24/7/365. Only a small portion of those sources is professionally operated with accountability for the substance and/or style of the so-called reporting.

Today it drives me nuts to consume news – that is, to really think about what I’m reading or hearing the way I did in the 1970s. Today, meaningful matters often get buried in trivia while the most inane and inaccurate stories and comments can go viral overnight.

I’ve always said you can get too much of a good thing – too much food; too much free time; and certainly, too much sports. And clearly, we have too much “news” about sports.