Loss of Innocence
May 30, 2014
Last school year we were criticized for not looking before we leapt to the conclusion that some international transfer students at several schools were not eligible, and for ruling them ineligible for the then maximum allowable period of one calendar year.
In several cases – both school employees and others – told us that the students weren’t good basketball players, notwithstanding that it was people with interests in basketball who brought the students to our state, and that those people and others with basketball interests lobbied hard on the students’ behalf.
It turned out, almost without exception, those who appealed most ardently for the eligibility of an international transfer student actually had the least appealing cases.
In the case of one student, we discovered an online video made a year earlier, taped while the student was still abroad, touting his height and demonstrating his basketball ability. Not about basketball, you say?
In another case where “basketball was not the issue,” a student later committed to play basketball for an NCAA Division I basketball program in 2014-15. He went from “mediocre” to the Mid-American Conference without ever playing his senior season of high school?
We were criticized during 2013-14 for being too suspicious, but the results of 2013-14 will make us even more suspicious in 2014-15.
Fortunately, the MHSAA will have a more complete set of tools to address transfer students this fall than it has had at any time in its history; and after what has been happening in recent years, people seem ready – even impatient – for the MHSAA to be enabled to move with more might when students – either international or domestic – transfer for athletic reasons.
No Returns or Refunds
January 18, 2013
The “Boxing Day” tradition of New Zealand, like most of the current or former British Empire, is to return to stores on the day after Christmas the unwanted or ill-fitting gifts of Christmas. My wife and I exchanged no gifts this year, except for the gift of time with each other and our China-based son and his wife in New Zealand. So we had nothing to return, and we’ve had moments to savor.
Outside our window on Christmas Day was an extinct volcano rising 758 feet above New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty coast. Its peak was hidden in clouds sent by the remnants of Cyclone Evan. We couldn’t see the top of Mt. Maunganui; but our fragment of the Roberts family who had gathered for this holiday, below the equator and on the other side of the International Dateline, decided on a “Christmas climb” anyway.
Attempting a challenge whose goal is shrouded in uncertainty is an every-season experience of coaches, which may be the opiate that draws so many men and women to that vocation for so long, and consumes coaches so far beyond what are reasonable hours for most other occupations.
Even in the more mundane existence of a state high school association administrator, it is the unknown of each year, week and day that energizes the grind. How boring it would be to know what’s at the end of each climb. How exciting it can be to come to a problem-solving table with good ideas and also with the expectation that the best ideas will come out of collaboration with others’ good ideas.
I count myself among the fortunate folks who, at the end of most days and weeks and years, do not feel inclined to want to return the gifts that each has brought. And I’m still attracted to the discovery of what the next cloud-shrouded climb may reveal.