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The Investment

February 3, 2015

Last month, Steve Christilaw who writes for the Spokane (WA) Spokesman-Review, ended an opinion piece with these statements:

“. . . a strong, vibrant society invests in its future by investing in young people. What our youth can learn from playing sports are life lessons we, as a society, place at a high value.

“How we pay for it all – education, the arts and athletics – has become a political football . . . and it deserves to be treated as the serious and significant investment that it truly is.”

Previous to that conclusion, Christilaw opined from his experience that the values of participation in school-sponsored sports are different than what young people gain in non-school club teams where the focus is more often on one’s self than cooperating with a team and representing a school or entire community.

There are those, of course, who see athletics as a distraction from the educational mission of academic institutions. I don’t doubt that can be the case in some places on some occasions; and I know from experience that leadership must be vigilant to keep a lid on the program and resist those who wish to take school sports to extremes.

But athletic programs which are true to the mission of supporting the educational mission of schools are far more the rule than the exception, most often operating at small fractions of the school budget, and most often involving large majorities of the student body.

A “serious and significant investment” indeed.

How Much is Too Much?

April 26, 2013

Everybody acknowledges it’s a different world today, that school sports are not the only game in town anymore. Many people also recognize that well-intentioned rules to curb excesses and abuses in school sports not only do that, but also tend to drive student-athletes to non-school coaches and programs.

Every other year or two for the past dozen years or more there has been a tweaking of rules – nothing radical – addressing what can occur out of season between school coaches and their student-athletes.

We’ve been slow to change, worrying that if we go too far too fast, we might change too much of what shouldn’t change and never be able to change it back.

This is a difficult and defining topic we must keep before us.  How much activity we allow out of season, or don’t allow, affects the nature of educational athletics in Michigan.  Both our actions to date, as well as our inactions, have already shaped our scene, for better or worse; and both will continue to do so.