On the Hook
March 12, 2013
The over-arching theme of interscholastic athletic administration today is the health and safety of our student participants. It’s always our most important concern but now, by both self-serving and serious advocates, it’s being made a political football – actually more like a soccer ball being kicked back and forth and back again, resulting in about as much chance of scoring any positive goals as a World Cup soccer game will have in scoring any goals at all.
We are daily being distracted, and taken off our tasks, by symbolic more than substantive proposals to require this, that or the other thing to protect children from the risk of injury – regardless of grassroots input and without regard to grassroots resources. Zealous advocates for child safety wish to protect children from any risk of physical exertion, while in the next breath they complain of youth inactivity and obesity. And those who are trying to increase participation AND the quality of that experience – that’s us – become the targets of criticism. Often, those who have never done anything, blame those who have done a lot, for not doing enough.
Our frustration is flowing from the health and safety “idea du jour” to which we must respond, knowing that every time we fail to gush over some legislator’s or advocate’s notion, we invite the characterization that we are uncaring, lazy or arrogant, or all of the above. What we are doing is protecting schools from ubiquitous, onerous mandates which no one else in the school community is taking notice of because, appropriately, they are focused on the impossible task of providing an ever-expanding list of required services to an ever-increasing percentage of school-aged children with an ever-increasing list of problems, with the expectation that all of them will perform at ever-improving levels of achievement.
But even with all these disclaimers, I can’t let us off the hook. There are some things we can do and must do to better meet our highest calling in educational athletics which, if we’ve lost sight of it in the confusing clutter of challenges, is not only to do no harm physically to students but also to help instill in them healthy habits for the rest of their lives. Consistent with this high calling, we have obligations to do some critically important things – sometimes in spite of outside interference and sometimes beyond that interference – and do so without delay. It is about those things that I have been commenting most these past few months, and will continue to address.
The Next Big Thing
February 16, 2016
The full-time athletic director, without a lot of other duties and with support for clerical matters as well as event supervision, is a situation rarely seen in secondary schools today. That’s bad for students, schools and school sports.
Today, typically the athletic director’s job is divided among many areas of a school’s operations. And when a veteran athletic director retires, moves up or otherwise moves on, it is typical that the “replacement” is an inexperienced person who is given even more to do with less time to do it.
So, when I asked the MHSAA Representative Council in December to talk about and commit to writing what it believes is the “next big thing” the MHSAA should be doing, it was not surprising to me that the consensus was this: “We should be conducting much more Athletic Director In-Service training, both in person and electronically, for both new ADs and veterans; and we shouldn’t shy away from a ‘back-to basics’ approach, with testing.”
The theme of the responses of Representative Council members in December was that as schools are becoming increasingly under-resourced, the MHSAA must do more. Clearly, the Representative Council (as a group) has lower expectations for what schools can do for themselves, and higher expectations for what the MHSAA should be doing to help schools. If there is a worry in all this, it is that the Representative Council is losing confidence in the principle of “institutional control,” and the Council sees the need to place increasing demands on the MHSAA to train, oversee and actually do things that would have been an overreach of our proper role 20 or even 10 years ago.
The transformational idea here – I don’t like it, but perhaps it’s unavoidable – is that the MHSAA must do more because of the reality that overburdened, under-resourced school personnel can only do less. And, if we fail to do more, school sports will continue to create problems for itself, and worse, continue to drift to a point where school sports are barely distinguishable from non-school sports programs.
We are seeing building athletic directors less engaged in the administration of school sports and, in their place, local administrators are depending on third parties to schedule games and assign officials, or they are delegating scheduling and most administrative details to their coaches, an increasing number of whom are nonfaculty members who have more affinity to non-school sports than school sports. This isn’t just happening in skiing, golf and bowling but also in basketball and other sports.
As we inventory the controversies we’ve endured this past fall, we see that in almost every case there was a lack of knowledge or execution at the local level that created a problem which people then were all too ready to blame the MHSAA for. The policy or the organization gets criticized for an individual’s deficient attention or action at the local level. And every controversy is a distraction – it gets in the way of our work, and it adversely affects our ability to convey a positive message about the important role of educational athletics in the lives of students, schools and society.