Enhancing Public Health
August 29, 2017
Due to overuse injuries from sport specialization that is too early, too intense and too prolonged, youth may be increasingly susceptible to sports-related injuries; but school sports themselves have never been safer – for obvious reasons:
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Equipment is the best it’s ever been.
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Coaches have never been better trained in health and safety.
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Practice and competition rules have never been more safety conscious.
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Officials have never had more authority to penalize unsafe play.
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Medical care and insurance has never been as available as it is today.
Our objective is not merely to keep making school-sponsored sports safer and safer year after year. In school sports – educational athletics – we also have the objective that students learn habits of a healthy lifestyle they can carry into adulthood.
In this way, school sports mitigates some of the damage of youth sports and contributes to the general good, to improved public health in America.
All that we do has that goal, and it’s a finish line we have not yet crossed.
Prep Prose
January 27, 2017
Mick McCabe retired in December after almost five full decades at the Detroit Free Press.
When Mick agreed with me, he did so boldly. When he disagreed, he sometimes did so brutally.
He was at his best, and did most for school sports in Michigan, when he told the stories of coaches and athletes in the cities, suburbs and small towns all across our state. Especially when he told the stories of those who would never coach or play a game beyond the high school level. Especially when he found and focused on an unknown person in a low-profile sport who raised our spirits by reminding us of how good educational athletics can be.
Mick may have written more words about high school sports in Michigan than any person ever. And that's saying a lot when one remembers Jack Moss and Bob Gross and Bob Becker and Jane Bos and Del Newell and Cindy Fairfield and a dozen other retired sports writers in our state whose substantial bodies of work promoted prep sports.
School sports usually has been well-served by such media professionals who were allowed by their industry to take the time necessary to know the people and the policies that served school sports, and were allowed the space to develop stories that went beyond headlines, tweets and texts, with fuller facts and closer truth than is the norm today.