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 Game Changer
July 9, 2012
In the year 2000, fewer than 300,000 books were published in the United States. In 2010, more than a million were published.
This means that electronic media didn’t kill the book publishing industry, as some experts predicted. Quite the opposite. But electronic media surely changed the industry in several major ways, including:
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It democricized the industry – made it cheaper and easier for almost all of us to publish whatever we want, whenever we want, even if only our family and closest friends might read it.
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It dumbed down the industry. With almost everybody able to produce almost anything, the average quality of published works has plummeted.
The importance of these book industry statistics to us is that they point to what can and does happen in other aspects of life, including school sports. They provide evidence that sometimes what we think might crush us, only changes us. Causes us to do things differently – cheaper, faster or better and, sometimes, all three at once.
Some of us in school sports may, sometimes, curse electronic media; but many of the changes they have brought us are positive. Like officials registering online, receiving game assignments online and filing reports online. Like schools rating officials online; and online rules meetings for coaches and officials. Like schools scheduling games online, and spectators submitting scores online. Like the ArbiterGame scheduling program the MHSAA is now providing all its member high schools free of charge.