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.
A Dedicated Downtime
November 7, 2014
Those who administer, coach or play school sports have become familiar with the phrase “downtime” to describe that period just before a season when coaches are not allowed to assemble players for activities that look too much like practice being conducted before the earliest practice of the season is allowed by rule.
In school sports, therefore, we often consider the downtime as a time to do less as teams – less than during the season, and even less than what is allowed teams during most of the offseason. If student-athletes are going to prepare for the upcoming season, they do so more as individuals than as organized teams during the brief preseason downtime.
In this we might look to the arts and literature for assistance; for it is in the downtime – the time away, on one’s own – that many artists, writers and other creative types have found their inspiration for excellence.
In Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, author Mason Currey describes the working habits of 160 creative thinkers. A common theme is the time these people demanded to be away from others to walk, sit and ponder. To wonder. To work through obstacles that seemed to be blocking their progress.
This is an imperfect analogy for student-athletes and school coaches, but it’s still instructive. In fact, a disconnected downtime – one without television, texting, tweeting and team drills, but with time and space to earnestly assess strengths and address weaknesses – might be central to an effective prescription for the upcoming season.