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An Excuse to Get Together

March 15, 2013

I recently heard a veteran teacher tell the story of years ago when she was leading a church youth group which was meeting regularly to prepare a play.  The group met frequently for many months.

Eventually, one of the church members, and parent of one of the youth, asked when the group would be performing their production.  The teacher/leader responded, “That’s not the point.  The play is just an excuse for getting together.” 

Hearing this story resonated with me as I thought back to my years as a high school student who participated in sports, drama and choral music, and as I thought about my two sons who did the same in middle school and high school, and as I thought about my too-brief time as a teacher/coach.  The contests, concerts and dramatic performances for the public were almost entirely beside the point.

What was more important by far was getting together with other students to work together on projects outside the classroom.  To do positive things, creative things.  To experiment under controlled conditions.  To develop a team spirit.

This is why it is especially important that schools maintain broad and deep extracurricular options for students.  Important particularly that they not only maintain but grow subvarsity programs where the emphasis is more likely to keep focused on practice more than games, and teaching and learning more than winning and recordkeeping.

Innovation Obstacles

April 12, 2013

It doesn’t take long to compile a dozen or more examples of products or businesses that have disappeared, or nearly so, because the world changed while the product or business did not.

Think eight-track tapes and players.  Consider what digital photography has done, from the Eastman Kodak Company to out-of-business local studios.  What the Internet has done to travel agents.  See what’s happened and still happening to print newspapers across the country, to magazines, and to both local and large chain bookstores.

It is not at all rare that businesses fail to reinvent themselves.  For many reasons, including admirable passion for what they are doing, business leaders often miss the trends or ignore the signs that suggest the need to change their products or their entire business model.

As Geoff Colvin wrote in FORTUNE magazine Feb. 25, 2013, “Business model innovation is a competency that doesn’t exist in most companies.”  He continued:  “The largest obstacles will be weak imaginations, threatened interests, and culture.”

I suspect that those are also the three major obstacles we must overcome as we think about the future of interscholastic athletics.

  • Does school-based sports, with a 100-year-old history, have a 50 or even 15 year future in schools and society?

  • If so, should the business model change?  And if so, how?

I suspect that some of what we think is change may be no better than rotating bald tires on our car; when what we really need is new tires, or no tires at all.