Full Decade Price Freeze
September 15, 2011
The 2011-12 school year marks the 10th consecutive year of no increase in MHSAA Regional tournament tickets for football and boys and girls basketball; and it’s the ninth consecutive year without increase at the District level of those tournaments. This is noteworthy on at least three levels.
First, it means parents, grandparents, neighbors and friends on fixed incomes or struggling through a fickle economy have experienced no new costs to support their local school teams over the past decade.
Second, it means that what were the MHSAA’s largest revenue sources – gate receipts from District and Regional tournaments of football, boys basketball and girls basketball – have not been used to support the MHSAA’s expanding services.
Finally, when the freeze on ticket prices is combined with the freefall of girls and boys basketball attendance since the change of girls basketball season to the winter (the four-year average total attendance is down 9.3 percent for the girls tournament and down 21.1 percent for the boys tournament), the overall effect on the MHSAA’s operational budget is dramatic.
To compensate, the MHSAA has cut expenses and created new revenue sources. For years, MHSAA tournaments produced more than 90 percent of the MHSAA’s revenue. In 2010-11, it was less than 80 percent. The 2011-12 target is less than 75 percent.
The Languages of Sports
August 6, 2013
Our state is enriched by the cultural diversity which has resulted from decades of families relocating from other countries to Michigan for the opportunities available here.
Often the children in these families are conversant in English, but their parents are less so. This is why, for example, the Refugee Development Center in Lansing not only provides ESL classes for students but also for parents; and why the RDC provides interpreters to accompany parents to school events such as parent-teacher conferences. The RDC currently serves refugees from 28 different countries.
Becoming increasingly sensitized to these dynamics, the MHSAA has recently begun a long process of providing certain of its documents in other languages than English. We’re going to focus on those documents that we provide to schools which parents would want to read to learn about what is being described to or required of their children with respect to interscholastic athletic participation.
The first such documents are the two-page and four-page preparticipation physical examination forms. And the first languages chosen for the service are Spanish, which is the most common non-English language spoken in the United States, and Arabic, which acknowledges that Michigan is home to the largest Arabic-speaking population in the US.
You will find these documents here.