Half Empty or Half Full
December 11, 2012
After an absence of decades, eight-player football has been reintroduced to Michigan high schools during recent years. When enough schools sponsored the program, the MHSAA responded with a four-week playoff in 2011. The number of schools sponsoring the sport grew in 2012, and more growth is expected for the 2013 season.
Like almost everything that occurs in life, what has benefited some schools is not seen by others to be in their own best interests.
Advocates of the eight-player game include those schools whose declining enrollments couldn’t support the eleven-player game. Football has returned to some communities and has been saved from the brink of elimination in others.
However, as two and soon three dozen Class D schools opt for the eight-player game, the remaining Class D schools that sponsor football find themselves in disrupted leagues and forced to travel further to complete eleven-player football schedules; and they must compete against larger teams in Division 8 of the eleven-player MHSAA Football Playoffs.
In fact, the growth of the eight-player game among our smallest schools has resulted in more Class D schools qualifying for the MHSAA Football Playoffs than ever before. In 2012, an all-time high 44.0 percent of Class D schools that sponsor football qualified for either the single division eight-player tournament or Division 8 of the eleven-player tournament. This compares to 42.2 percent of Class C schools, 44.9 percent of Class B schools and 41.6 percent of Class A schools that sponsor football and qualified for the 2012 playoffs.
Some see the eight-player game as the savior of the football experience in Class D schools. Others see it differently.
A Different Play for Football?
April 30, 2013
Football is an original high school sport. It is one of the first sports sponsored that was by schools even before the MHSAA existed as an organization.
Because football started in schools, not communities, football has been the high school sport least affected by non-school sports programs. Until now.
Non-school seven-on-seven football threatens interscholastic football. Commercialized seven-on-seven football threatens to do to interscholastic football what AAU types have done to basketball, and other entities have done to volleyball, soccer and other school sports.
A national committee was convened last year to address seven-on-seven football. It recognized problems but could only wring its hands regarding solutions.
I’d like to see the MHSAA convene representatives of the Michigan High School Football Coaches Association and the Michigan Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association to mine for more meaningful responses in Michigan.
A limited number of days of seven-on-seven football involving school coaches and their students is already permissible during the summer. If more days were allowed in the summer under tightly controlled circumstances (read “non-commercial”), would this tend to improve the environment of seven-on-seven football? Would it also help to allow a few days of seven-on-seven football practice and play in the spring? Or would that hurt the spring sports programs of schools?
Can we learn from what happened in non-school basketball and discern a different game plan for non-school football if we now respond differently (and more quickly!) for football than we did for basketball 20-30 years ago?