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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.

Our End of the Pool

June 26, 2012

The six-year veteran CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi, told Fortune magazine’s Geoff Colvin in a June feature, “Courage in leadership is very difficult, especially in today’s world, where the media doesn’t take time to really understand you.”

We can relate to this in our work in school sports, as very many veteran sports journalists and broadcasters have retired or been downsized, replaced by staff who are fewer in number and relationships and weaker in institutional knowledge and professionalism.

Whenever I read, watch or hear news accounts concerning topics that involve our work and about which I know a lot, I can see how incomplete and inaccurate the reporting is.  This has always been true, but now is much more obvious; and this has made me even more skeptical when I read through other topics about which I know less.  How much of this is opinion, not fact?  What facts are incompletely presented?  What “facts” are just plain wrong?

In this environment, it’s risky for leaders to step out with new initiatives; and it’s even riskier to defend the status quo, for the establishment is routinely presumed to be wrong by media who now often lack subject-matter depth and historical perspective.

Still, it remains the leader’s role, according to Jim Collins in Great by Choice, to not just predict the future, but to go out and create it anyway – in spite of criticism by media who have little experience swimming in our subject matter and who are merely wading into the shallow end of our deep pool.  Sometimes creating the future means doing something new and different; but just as often – perhaps even more so – it means defending something whose existence helps to maintain the very essence of educational athletics.