Deepening Appreciation
May 15, 2012
The first phase of ArbiterGame launches May 23.
The creation of these electronic athletic department administrative tools, tailor-made for Michigan high schools and fully integrated with MHSAA policies and procedures, is bridging most of whatever remaining gap that may exist in the MHSAA leadership’s understanding of and appreciation for the job of its member school athletic administrators and their support staff.
The MHSAA is in partnership with ArbiterSports to create the tools; and at each step of design and deployment, MHSAA staff are consulting with local athletic directors. MHSAA staff have been engaged in training to help answer user questions from athletic administrators and secretaries. There have been more hours than we can count when our staff has listened to athletic administrators talk about details of their tasks, and even more hours when our staff has talked about how we best respond to even the smallest details.
The process is helping MHSAA staff appreciate the long list of duties required for every athletic event for every level of every sport. Never before have MHSAA staff talked so much about local scheduling of practices, games, facilities, transportation, workers and officials. Never have we had a deeper and broader appreciation for all that is required – day after day, week after week, season after season.
As we develop administrative tools to ease the local school administrative burden, we deepen our understanding of the work in which local administrators are engaged. We started this project to respond to athletic directors’ urgent requests to solve the problems of inadequate scheduling products and related support services from commercial vendors. An unanticipated benefit has been to enhance our knowledge of their daily duties. And we will be much better for it.
Dodger Lessons
August 6, 2013
The first baseball team I played on was the Dodgers. I’ve been a Dodger fan ever since, checking their place in the National League standings almost every day of the season, year after year. It would have been difficult to learn more about sports and life from any professional sports franchise than one could learn from the Dodgers as I was growing up.
It was the Dodgers who returned integration to the Major Leagues in 1951, which from my home in central Wisconsin seemed unremarkable; and when I became old enough to think about baseball, Jackie Robinson was my most favorite player for a long while.
It was the Dodgers who led the Major League’s migration from the northeast to the west, which my young mind could not grasp. From historic Brooklyn to Los Angeles? To play in the Coliseum?
I could not know then that this leading edge of professional sports franchise mobility would become an early adopter of a new toy called “television,” and that this would solidify baseball’s place as the national pastime for two more generations.
I coped with tragedy as catcher Roy Campanella suffered a paralyzing injury. I considered religion’s place in life as Sandy Koufax declined to pitch on Jewish holy days.
The Dodgers of my youth already knew that life is not fair. How could it be after Oct. 3, 1951, when the hated Giants’ Bobby Thompson hit a ninth-inning homerun to steal the National League pennant from my Dodgers?
Sadly, the Dodgers of more recent years have been beset by the kind of ownership dramas now common among professional sports as the insipid idle rich ruin even the most stable and storied franchises.
And speaking of rich, had it not been for my dear mother’s insatiable desire to clean out every closet she found, I might be rich too. For I had collected, and kept in mint condition, the baseball card of every Dodger player of the 1950s. They were thrown out while I was away at college.