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Life Saving Lessons

June 24, 2015

In 2015-16, we enter the fourth quarter of a heightened eight-year health and safety emphasis. We began with Health Histories in 2009-10 and 2010-11; the second quarter focus in 2011-12 and 2012-13 was Heads; the third quarter focus in 2013-14 and 2014-15 was Heat. In 2015-16 and 2016-17, it’s Hearts that we bring in focus ... especially addressing sudden cardiac arrest which is the No. 1 cause of death to youth during exertion.

Sudden cardiac arrest seems to us to have a random, unpredictable nature; and medical experts tell us that screening is somewhat unreliable, often missing some likely candidates even as the tests identify many false positives. There are symptoms of sudden cardiac arrest, but they often reveal themselves too late to be of much help, like sudden collapse, no pulse, no breathing and loss of consciousness.

Nevertheless, there is something we can do. We can be prepared. We can develop emergency plans, display AEDs and deliver CPR. And, like any good sports teams, we need to practice our preparations.

Through the energy of the Minnesota State High School League and the generosity of Medtronic and the NFHS Foundation, the MHSAA has sent to every MHSAA member high school athletic director this month the ANYONE CAN SAVE A LIFE Emergency Action Planning Guide for After-School Practices and Events. This publication suggests a game plan that establishes four teams on every level of every sport in a school – a 911 Team, CPR Team, AED Team and Heat Stroke Team.

This resource can help schools revise or revitalize their existing emergency plans in ways that engage team members in planning, practice and execution. This could help save lives now and also convey important lifelong lifesaving lessons to students involved on these teams.

Sold Out

December 13, 2016

We are sometimes criticized for limiting the scope of school sports – for restricting long-distance travel and prohibiting national tournaments; but there is no question that we are doing the correct thing by protecting school sports from the excesses and abuses that characterize major college sports.

Across the spectrum of intercollegiate athletics, but especially in Division I football and basketball, there exists an insatiable “keep-up-with-the-Joneses” appetite.

Universities are building increasingly extravagant facilities. They are sending their “students” into increasingly expansive scheduling. But it’s never enough.

There is always another university somewhere building a bigger stadium, a fancier press box or more palatial dressing rooms, practice facilities and coaches quarters.

So-called “students” are sent across the US and beyond to play on any day at any time in order to generate revenue to keep feeding the beast.

The Big Ten knows it’s wrong, admits it, but schedules football games on Friday nights to attract larger rights fees from television.

Feeling used or abused, some of the athletes of Northwestern and then at the University of Wisconsin, talk of creating a union to protect themselves from the obvious, rampant exploitation.

And then occasionally, some college coaches dare to suggest that high schools are wrong to have regulations that reject the road that colleges have traveled, a road that has distanced athletics very far from academics in intercollegiate sports.

The intercollegiate model is not and must not be the interscholastic model. We who are sold out for educational athletics have nothing good to learn from those who have sold out for broadcast revenue.