Jousting at Windmills
July 19, 2012
Charles Barkley uttered famously last month that the worst thing that ever happened to basketball was the AAU.
While it doesn’t all occur under the Amateur Athletic Union’s banner, Mr. Barkley is not the first “authority” to offer such a brash opinion and to blame the AAU for much of what is bad about the current state of non-school basketball, where street agents and shoe companies corrupt children and their coaches, and where basketball is played with little emphasis on fundamental skills and team play.
Certainly, there are others to blame, including all who have made college and professional basketball a business lucrative enough to encourage excesses and unethical practices. And all of this is bigger than any one state high school athletic association can change.
Nevertheless, the MHSAA is in its fourth year of quixotic jousting with the monster about which so many have been complaining so long.
Tomorrow for boys, and then eight days later for girls (July 26), the MHSAA is teaming up again with the Basketball Coaches Association of Michigan (BCAM) to provide Reaching Higher, “an advance placement course” for students who have both the interest and potential to participate in college basketball on some level.
Through Reaching Higher we intend for players and parents to gain greater appreciation for the rules and realities of the college recruitment process and for what it takes both academically and athletically to qualify for and succeed in intercollegiate basketball.
Click here to view the details.
The Golden Rule
October 24, 2014
Competitive athletics are filled with rules. They include contest limitations and eligibility, conduct and playing rules. But apparently the “Golden Rule” is not one of those rules.
In competitive athletics, teams look for competitive advantage, which is often at odds with the spirit of “Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.” Seeking competitive advantage sometimes devolves from a legitimate attempt to exploit an opponent’s weakness to rule-shading gamesmanship and, in its worst form, to blatant cheating. Do unto others what you can get away with.
Furthermore, in competitive athletics, emotions often run high – both among participants and spectators – and this leads easily to overheated partisan perspective, lack of good reason and loss of behavior that is respectful of others’ beliefs and feelings.
It’s hard to treat nicely people who act nasty. It requires, in fact, a supercharged Golden Rule that says “Do unto others better than they may do unto you.”
It’s hard to treat people better than they treat you; but if there were ever a place where there is more opportunity to do so, it’s in competitive sports where people are blinded by partisanship for their team or their child. Perhaps it’s only a political election campaign that presents as tough an environment for the Golden Rule.
Years ago in a radio commentary, Character Counts’ Michael Josephson said: “People of character treat others respectfully whether they deserve it or not. I’m reminded of the politician who refused to get in a name-calling match with an opponent, saying, ‘Sir, I will treat you like a gentleman, not because you are one, but because I am one.’ Sure, it’s hard to treat people better than they treat us; but it’s important to realize what’s at stake. If we allow nasty, crude and selfish people to drag us down to their level, they set the tone of our lives and shape us in their image.”