Data is Due
December 4, 2015
Allow me to wander way outside my expertise for a moment … to quantum physics. I believe this is the discipline where it is said that “something doesn’t exist until it is described and measured.”
This statement embodies one of the reasons the MHSAA has mandated that, beginning this school year, member schools must report all possible head injuries in the practices and events of school sports. We want to get at least a general description and approximate measurement of our story here as we listen to the nationwide narrative about health and safety in school sports.
Early returns – that is, preliminary numbers for fall sports – are being presented to the MHSAA Representative Council today. A public release will follow before the end of the year. A more complete report – based on fall, winter and spring sports – will be provided after the conclusion of the 2015-16 school year. And in the future, year-to-year comparisons of the numbers will provide a more meaningful story.
The MHSAA is also gathering data from two pilot programs that are intended to increase attention on sideline concussion detection and recordkeeping, and also from the concussion care insurance the MHSAA has purchased for all participants in all MHSAA member junior high/middle schools and high schools beginning this school year.
Data from all three initiatives may help those who make the equipment and prepare the rules of play in the ongoing campaign to make our good school sports programs even better.
International Affairs
January 21, 2014
On Sept. 10, 2013, I wrote in this space what I later spoke at MHSAA Update Meetings across Michigan: that we had to assure that the increasing numbers of international students who are arriving in Michigan do so without undue influence and without upsetting the competitive balance between MHSAA member schools in interscholastic athletics. Both matters concern me even more today than last fall.
A 1996 federal law allows international students to attend nonpublic schools for any number of years and to do so at reduced tuition, but the law limits international students’ attendance at public schools to one year and requires they make full payment of all fees and expenses. This is creating an unlevel playing field in school sports.
These aren’t J-1 visa foreign exchange students cleared and placed for a single academic year by programs that have been approved by the Council on Standards for International Educational Travel. These are students on F-1 visas, which increased from 6,541 in 2007 to 65,452 in 2012, arriving in dozens of different ways and remaining for two, three or four years. These are not "blind" placements; they are arranged.
By this means, some small private schools have been balancing their budgets by increasing their enrollments by 10 to 20 percent and even more with an influx of international students, while still remaining under the Class D or Division 4 maximum for MHSAA tournament classification.
And making matters much worse, a few private schools of all sizes are receiving especially talented or tall students through arrangements made by parents of players and/or others associated with their school and/or AAU and college programs.
When we learn, for example, that people with basketball connections are arranging for students to come to Michigan, when they are directing these students to schools where these adults have connections, when in some cases these people are paying portions of the tuition and/or providing for living arrangements for these students, we have undue influence, plain and simple. These students lose eligibility; the adults involved must be disassociated with the schools; and the schools are penalized if they haven’t handled things as they should have.
But this is just putting a patch on the bigger problem – which is placing the same limits on international student attendance, regardless of the type of visa they have, or the type of school in which they enroll.
By next August, this association must have a rule that provides immediate eligibility for one year for all international students (whether J-1 or F-1) who are placed blindly in schools through CSIET-listed programs; and if they remain beyond that one year, then they must sit out one year. All other international students, except those who relocate with their family unit, should have no eligibility at the varsity level at any time.