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Making Participation Valuable

October 23, 2012

Boiled down, the role of state high school associations is to both protect and promote school sports, the second of which I comment on here.

It’s my experience that the most effective promotions speak for themselves.  The most effective promotions promote the fundamentals of school sports, like scholarship and sportsmanship and safety.  The most effective promotions provide tools to the membership at the grass roots level.

In Michigan we have a few initiatives whose primary purpose is to promote the value of participation, but we have many initiatives that encourage and equip those who make participation valuable.

For example, we administer the Coaches Advancement Program (CAP) all year long around the state to assist in the preparation of coaches for their important responsibilities.  Across the state during August through October we conduct Athletic Director In-Service programs.  Like many states, we conduct rules meetings for coaches and officials year-round, statewide. 

Each spring we have a training program for local officials association trainers and for their officers and leaders and assignors.  We conduct an annual Officials’ Awards and Alumni Banquet.

Every other February we conduct a Women in Sports Leadership Conference; and in the off years we provide mini-grants to support similar efforts on a more local level.

We conduct Sportsmanship Summits and provide mini-grants to leagues and local school districts to implement sportsmanship efforts at the local level where they can be most effective.  We conduct Team Captains Clinics and other student leadership events, and we provide mini-grants to support similar efforts on the league or local level.

None of these initiatives promotes the value of participation per se.  All of these initiatives encourage and equip those who make participation valuable.  That’s where I think our promotional efforts are best made.

 

Reality Check

July 7, 2015

The organization I worked for immediately prior to this 29-year run with the MHSAA utilized “harnessed hero worship” as its principal strategy for evangelism. It was generally effective; but because of human frailties, some of the heroes would disappoint us and disrupt the important work.

This experience and others over the years have caused me to, at most, only feign excitement when someone suggests we get this or that “Big Name” to keynote a conference or endorse an initiative. I prefer substance over style, and staying power over shooting stars.

All of this likely made me susceptible to shouting “Right On” when I read the May 14, 2015 blog post of Matt Amaral, a teacher in California. The title: “Dear Steph Curry, Now That You Are MVP, Please Don’t Come Visit My High School.”

Regarding celebrity worship, Mr. Amaral writes that we need less of it.

“Coming to poor high schools like mine isn’t going to help any of these kids out; in fact, it might make things worse.”

Amaral explains that unlike Curry (who is an example and not a target), the students he teaches are not genetic giants and do not have the resources and support that separate the less than one percent from the rest of us. “What you won’t see,” Amaral writes in his “open letter” to Curry, “is the fact that most of these kids don’t have a back-up plan for their dream of being you.”

“They are already very good at dreaming about being rich and famous; what we need them to do is get a little more realistic about what is in their control. We need less of an emphasis on sports and celebrity in high school, because it is hurting these kids too much as it is.”

(You can find more of Mr. Amaral’s provocative thoughts at teach4real.com.)