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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?

Elite Soccer?

August 5, 2014

Every four years, the Winter Olympics brings obscure cold-weather sports to American homes; and a few months after that, the World Cup brings the world’s most popular game to the American conscience and conversation.

Predictably, those who don’t understand or don’t like soccer ridiculed the sport, while the sport’s devotees ignored ugly blemishes on the face of the “beautiful game.”

It’s my hope that those who play or coach school-based soccer, or who aspire to, saw the spacing, the strategy and the one-on-one skills of soccer at its highest level on its biggest stage. It really is beautiful!

But I wish even more that those who play or coach school-based soccer, or hope to, will ignore the feigning and the flopping. Grown, athletic men seemed to be tripped up by the slightest push or pull, and then tumbled with comical force, and then trembled dramatically as they held their head or gripped an ankle with both hands.

Oh, there were times when the shoves were real and forceful and the injuries were real and painful; but the vast majority of the players who fell were faking both incident and injury.

At times last month I thought I was watching World Wrestling Federation actors, not World Cup athletes. And in that regard, I prefer our high school version of the world’s highest profile sport.