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Dangerous Plays

February 26, 2013

The MHSAA’s fourth health and safety thrust for the next four years focuses on competition rules.  It intends to locate the most dangerous plays in each sport and to try to reduce their frequency.  For example:

  • We know that kickoff returns, punt returns and interception returns – plays in the open field with a change in direction – are the most dangerous football game situations.

  • We know that heading the ball in soccer is injurious, especially to younger athletes, and especially to females.

  •  We know that checking from behind is a cause of serious injury in ice hockey.

  • We wonder if protective headgear has a place in soccer, or if protective head and face protection has a future role in softball.

  • We know that ACL injuries in female basketball players and volleyball players is near epidemic and wonder if there is equipment or conditioning that can be mandated or recommended to save our players from what are serious and sometimes career-ending injuries.

We can make changes ourselves – through MHSAA sport committees – for the subvarsity level, but our committees can only make recommendations to national rules committees for varsity level play.  Over the next four years, we will be asking our sport committees to give more time to the most dangerous plays in their sport – identifying what they are and proposing how to reduce that danger.

Money Matters

January 14, 2014

Every once in a while someone will take a potshot at the MHSAA by saying the organization is motivated by money.

My colleagues in leadership of high school associations in other states probably would get a chuckle out of reading that criticism because the reputation of the MHSAA and this executive director is the opposite. We’re seen as the conservative stick-in-the-muds who oppose national tournaments and promotions in spite of the money that could be made from them.

Here’s a good checklist to determine if “the almighty dollar” motivates a high school association:

  1. Does the association co-title its tournaments with the name of commercial sponsors?

  2. Do the association’s events, publications and websites look like a NASCAR production with corporate logos plastered everywhere?

  3. Does the association seed its basketball tournaments or gerrymander brackets to allow the teams with the better records (and usually larger crowds) to avoid playing each other for as long into the tournament as possible?

  4. Does the association charge admission prices that are more than a fraction of college and professional ticket prices, or just equal to the cost of a movie?

One or more “Yes” answers doesn’t mean an association has sold out; but if all answers are “No,” you can be sure that the association has other purposes for its decisions than making money.

And “No” is the correct answer to these questions in Michigan. In fact, the full answer to No. 4 is that the MHSAA has not raised ticket prices for either basketball or football at either the District or Regional tournament level for more than a decade.