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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.

Youth Should be Served

December 26, 2013

A half-century ago, youth sports were not well organized. Children directed most of their own games, playing each sport in its season, moving from touch football in the side yard to basketball in the driveway to baseball in the vacant lot where an apartment building now stands. They walked or rode their bikes to the venues, they brought their own equipment, they chose up sides and they agreed upon the playing rules and ground rules.

Even if young people played on a community team, they spent more time in pickup games on makeshift fields, courts and diamonds than they did in uniforms at the groomed settings of the formal youth league games.

Gradually, the leagues multiplied and the ability groupings stratified. Elite teams were created consisting of the more talented kids, who were really just more mature for their age; and they were provided with the most games, the longest trips and the largest trophies. It didn’t take long for the other players to feel second class and to drop out of one sport or all sports. In time, even some of the “good” players succumbed to overuse injuries and emotional burnout.

By the time most students reached the earliest grades for school sports, many had already found different ways to spend their time. It is often cited and well-documented that, today, 80 to 90 percent of all youth who ever started playing organized sports have stopped doing so by age 13. Before high school.

So it occurs to me that school districts should have both altruistic and selfish reasons to rethink their approach to junior high/middle school sports, which is now to engage students too late and offer them too little. Schools might be able to provide a better experience for the youngsters and create an earlier and stronger relationship with the philosophies of educational athletics at the junior high/middle school level, and that ultimately will strengthen high school athletic programs.

This pursuit will take great care in order to assure that schools themselves do not make the same mistakes we have seen in overzealous youth sports programs. We will have to find the balance where multi-sport experiences are encouraged so middle school students can experiment with new sports and discover what they might really like and be good at, while at the same time provide enough additional contests that interscholastic programs are a more attractive option than non-school programs that may always allow more contests than school people will allow within an educational setting.