Family Practice
September 21, 2011
During my first winter on the job with the MHSAA I took my 4th-grade son to his first basketball practice, and I watched uncomfortably when his coach directed him to set a pick. My son didn’t have a clue what that meant, and was embarrassed; and I felt like a complete and utter failure as a sports dad.
During the drive home, my son asked me what the coach meant when he said “set a pick and then roll to the basket.”
So when we arrived home, I recruited his mom to guard my son as he dribbled the basketball in the living room, pretending the basket was over the fireplace hearth. I came up behind her and blocked her path as my son dribbled by, opening his path to the “basket.”
We repeated the drill, but this time his mom was wiser and scooted by me to guard my son; and when she did so, I rolled toward the “basket” and called for the ball. My son offered a perfect pass as I moved unguarded toward the goal.
We repeated the plays with me dribbling and my son setting the pick on his mom, and then rolling toward the goal.
Pick and roll, family style.
And my son couldn’t wait for the next practice.
A Map for Getting Lost
April 21, 2014
“It’s just another step in the wrong direction.”
That’s the brief response I’ve been giving to the frequent questions I’m receiving from people wanting to hear my opinion about unionizing college athletes.
When I’m pressed to elaborate, I provide these antecedents:
- Establishing the “athletic scholarship” – allowing athlete performance or potential to replace financial need as the basis for grants in aid.
- Removing intercollegiate coaches from the requirement that they be tenure track faculty members of the university.
- Removing the budget for the intercollegiate athletic department from the overall budget of the university.
- Splitting NCAA governance into divisions so that the more educationally-based programs of the smaller colleges could no longer keep the larger, educational-lost intercollegiate programs in check.
Certainly it has been the escalating and then exploding revenues of broadcast media that helped to ignite, or inflame the impact of, these developments over the past 50+ years.
Treating intercollegiate athletes as employees is a natural but still misguided next step on this road in the wrong direction. It provides a map to where interscholastic sports must not go.