The Essential AD

March 24, 2015

It’s the final week of the winter sports season.

If there is one time of the year when I hear it, and hear it again – that time is now when local school athletic administrators exhale deeply and admit they’re tired and need a break.

The winter season is long. Almost all the practices and contests are indoors, most sharing the same very limited spaces. Stormy weather wreaking havoc with schedules. Officials turning back games due to injury or fatigue.

Many of these administrators gathered last weekend at the annual conference of their professional organization, the Michigan Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association, which is the best of its kind in the country, unmatched in its commitment to professional development for athletic directors, regardless of their years of service.

It often impresses and inspires me to observe athletic directors, at the time of their greatest fatigue, coming together to be energized with each other’s company and educated by each other’s ideas to improve local programs.

As societal changes cause school competitions to become more complicated and controversial, the case for the full-time, well-trained athletic administrator becomes even more compelling. School districts that cut corners on this essential staff member find only that the resulting problems are worse – even more complicated and more controversial.

This professional administrator is the essential foundation of a safe and sensible program worthy of the name “educational athletics.”

Beyond Fairness

April 11, 2017

One of the lessons I learned decades ago when I was employed at the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) is that sometimes the playing rules are not fair.

The NFHS is the publisher of playing rules for most high school sports, and its rule books govern competition for most of the contests for most of the high schools in the U.S.

But the NFHS doesn’t publish the most fair rules. On purpose.

The rules for the high school level attempt to do much more than promote competitive equity, or a balance between offense and defense; they also attempt – without compromising participant health and safety – to simplify the administration of the game.

Unlike Major League Baseball, where umpires officiate full-time, and professional basketball, football and ice hockey where they officiate nearly full-time, the officials at the high school level are part-timers. They have other jobs. This is their avocation, not their vocation.

So the NFHS develops and publishes rules that minimize exceptions to the rules. In football, for example, there are fewer variables for determining the spot where penalties are enforced.

At the high school level, the rule makers intend that the rules be – for players, coaches and officials alike – quicker to learn, simpler to remember, and easier to apply during the heat of contests.