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Generations of Girls Tournaments

June 22, 2012

The MHSAA will have its “40th Anniversaries” for seven girls sports tournaments during the next three school years, but they are not our longest running girls tournaments.

The earliest MHSAA tournament for girls was regional in scope for the sport of alpine skiing – almost 60 years ago – in the winter of the 1953-54 school year.  Two regional meets were held for girls, and two for boys.  This continued for 21 consecutive years.

The first statewide MHSAA Ski Meet was held in Marquette in early 1975, the culminating event for a season during which the sport was sponsored for girls by 63 schools and for boys by 68 schools.

The first statewide MHSAA tournament for girls in any sport was held Jan. 12, 1972 in the sport of gymnastics.  Of 52 schools sponsoring girls gymnastics at that time, 33 had girls qualify for and participate in the meet, and 30 schools scored in six different events (today girls gymnastics has just four events; trampoline and tumbling no longer are contested).

During the 1972-73 school year, the MHSAA sponsored and conducted girls tournaments in tennis, swimming & diving, golf and track & field.  The first MHSAA Girls Basketball Tournament occurred the following school year, 1973-74; girls softball followed in the 1974-75 school year; and girls volleyball followed in the 1975-76 school year.

The girls who played in these first tournaments are now women in their mid- to late-fifties; and some will be rooting for their granddaughters in one of the 14 MHSAA tournaments now conducted for girls.

The Safe Play Game Plan

April 21, 2015

On Feb. 10, bills were introduced into both the United States Senate and United States House of Representatives, together called the “Safe Play Act,” which addresses three of the four health and safety “H’s” described in my last posting: Heat, Hearts and Heads.

For each of these topics, the federal legislation would mandate that the director of the Centers for Disease Control develop educational material and that each state disseminate that material.

For the heat and humidity management topic, the legislation states that schools will be required to adopt policies very much like the “MHSAA Model Policy to Manage Heat and Humidity” which the MHSAA adopted in March of 2013.

For both the heart and heat topics, schools will be required to have and to practice emergency action plans like we have been promoting in the past and will be distributing to schools this summer.

For the head section, the legislation would amend Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments and would eliminate federal funding to states and to schools which fail to educate their constituents or fail to support students who are recovering from concussions. This support would require multi-disciplinary concussion management teams that would include medical personnel, parents and others to provide academic accommodations for students recovering from concussions that are similar to the accommodations that are already required of schools for students with disabilities or handicaps.

This legislation would require return-to-play protocols similar to what we have in Michigan, and the legislation would also require reporting and record-keeping that is beyond what occurs in most places.

This proposed federal legislation demonstrates two things. First, that we have been on target in Michigan with our four Hs – it’s like they read our playbook of priorities before drafting this federal legislation.

This proposed federal legislation also demonstrates that we still have some work to do.