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The Fun Factor

November 14, 2014

My experience with school-age young people is that what they seek most from sports participation is fun and friends. More sophisticated research from many sources consistently has affirmed my less formal findings.

The Journal of Physical Activity & Health added a July study to the body of research. This work was conducted by George Washington University in Washington, DC, and focused on organized soccer.

What was so surprising about this study is not that winning was not at the top of the list of what makes sports enjoyable for youth, but that winning ranked 48th of 81 factors measured. Winning didn’t even make it in the top half!

The lead author of the study, Associate Professor of Sports Psychology Amanda Visek, was quoted by the Chicago Tribune to say “the fun experience is not determined by the result of a game but rather by the process of physically engaging in the game.”

Tribune writer Danielle Braff quotes this research and other expert commentary that coalesces around the consensus that it is parents, not athletes or coaches, who are most hung up on the outcome of the game, as well as the issues that create the pressure on young people that ruins the pleasure of play: position, playing time and prospects of making an elite team or earning a college scholarship.

That’s the stuff parents worry about much more than their kids. And, according to a growing body of research, some of which we've cited in this space before, that’s the stuff that causes many kids to quit organized sports. It’s not fun anymore.

A Meaning-Driven Brand

June 5, 2012

One of the apparent conclusions of the MHSAA online “Have Your Say” opinion poll conducted five years ago that continues to guide us today, is that the character of school sports is key to the appeal of school sports.  This is true for both sponsoring school personnel and for those participants and spectators regularly involved in school sports.  This suggests that to keep our core customers, we must preserve our core characteristics.  That whatever changes occur in school styles and structures, we must maintain by our policies and programs the features and values which our core customers have experienced and both want and expect to continue.

It may sometimes feel that we are swimming against the current of public opinion when we enforce rules that define student eligibility or the limits of competition and travel, but the development and implementation of such restrictions might be essential to the expectations of our core constituents for the experience they remember for themselves and want for their children or team.

Just because schools change, it is not necessary that rules of school sports change as well.  Sometimes, perhaps.  But not always or even often.  Leadership must always consider the program without a rule before we do away with the rule.

It is not too strong to state that schools seek MHSAA membership precisely because there are rules.  In fact, schools formed the MHSAA to be their vehicle for making and enforcing rules.  Just as participation by students is more valuable to them and their schools where standards of eligibility and conduct are higher, so is membership by schools in an organization more valuable where such standards are developed and enforced.

The Culting of Brands is a good book with a bad title in which author Douglas Atkin writes about the success of “a meaning-driven brand.”  He says, “The product carries the message and then becomes it.”  These kinds of brands, he says, are really beliefs.  “They have morals – embody values.”  They “stand up for things.  They work hard; fight for what is right.”

Ultimately, it is exactly this that is expected of the high school brand of competitive athletics in Michigan.