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:
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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.
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We know that heading the ball in soccer is injurious, especially to younger athletes, and especially to females.
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We know that checking from behind is a cause of serious injury in ice hockey.
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We wonder if protective headgear has a place in soccer, or if protective head and face protection has a future role in softball.
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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.
A Different Play for Football?
April 30, 2013
Football is an original high school sport. It is one of the first sports sponsored that was by schools even before the MHSAA existed as an organization.
Because football started in schools, not communities, football has been the high school sport least affected by non-school sports programs. Until now.
Non-school seven-on-seven football threatens interscholastic football. Commercialized seven-on-seven football threatens to do to interscholastic football what AAU types have done to basketball, and other entities have done to volleyball, soccer and other school sports.
A national committee was convened last year to address seven-on-seven football. It recognized problems but could only wring its hands regarding solutions.
I’d like to see the MHSAA convene representatives of the Michigan High School Football Coaches Association and the Michigan Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association to mine for more meaningful responses in Michigan.
A limited number of days of seven-on-seven football involving school coaches and their students is already permissible during the summer. If more days were allowed in the summer under tightly controlled circumstances (read “non-commercial”), would this tend to improve the environment of seven-on-seven football? Would it also help to allow a few days of seven-on-seven football practice and play in the spring? Or would that hurt the spring sports programs of schools?
Can we learn from what happened in non-school basketball and discern a different game plan for non-school football if we now respond differently (and more quickly!) for football than we did for basketball 20-30 years ago?