Life Saving

January 22, 2013

Just prior to last month’s holidays, all MHSAA staff completed a refresher course in CPR and use of AEDs.

Next month – Feb. 4-8 – a consortium of governmental and non-governmental groups is planning and promoting “Michigan Schools CPR/AED Drill Week.”

Early intervention by calling 9-1-1 and the use of the most up-to-date CPR procedures and an AED are the critical factors to increase the chance of surviving cardiac arrest.

Plan now to use Feb. 4-8, 2013, as a focal point for extra attention to the simple steps that can help save the lives of our students, colleagues, friends and neighbors.  A helpful website is http://www.aeddrill.com.

Hopefully, this one week will be used to increase expectations that AED drills will occur with regularity – perhaps every semester – at every MHSAA member school.

The Importance of Play

September 9, 2016

In the usual post-Olympic sports news coverage there was the predictable commentary about over-commercialization of the Olympic movement and corruption of the Olympic ideal. Is this really what the Greeks intended?

Of course not.

But really, what do we do today that has any resemblance to what we intended a century ago when the “modern” Olympic movement was resurrected, much less to what was intended 27 centuries earlier when the ancient Olympics began?

But at least one thing with ancient Greek roots remains unchanged. It is this.

Plato, student of Socrates, mentor of Aristotle and founder of the “academy” in Athens during the heyday of the ancient OIympics, wrote that more can be learned about a person in an hour of play than a year of conversation.

That has not changed.

And that is one very important of very many reasons why play of a competitive nature – not mere recreation – matters, just as much today as 28 centuries ago. In fact, in this “modern” world of nonstop electronic conversation, the hour of physical engagement between people may be our most revealing communication.