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.
Fantasy Land
March 8, 2013
Advocating at the national level for unachievable ideals not only diminishes the importance of those achieving reasonable accomplishments at the grassroots level, it also threatens the future of organized sports for the masses; and few organizations in a position to know better are doing as much to create these unintended consequences as the National Athletic Trainers Association.
It is a NATA-driven “Youth Sports Safety Alliance” that has developed a six-page manifesto for youth sports, including NATA’s “Secondary School Student Athletes’ Bill of Rights” which is mostly beyond the means of youth sports sponsors, and has marched to Capitol Hill to urge the federal legislature’s action to pursue those goals, among which is the conveniently unstated objective of advancing job opportunities and security for athletic trainers themselves.
MHSAA surveys indicate that, conservatively, fewer than 20 percent of Michigan high schools and junior high/middle schools have a full-time certified athletic trainer on staff. In fact, only a minority of schools think such a full-time position is necessary, given other cheaper options available to them in the form of contracted services of medical groups and the volunteered services of many other medical professionals. An even smaller minority has the means to pay for a full-time certified athletic trainer, given all the cuts in state aid to schools; and many schools – urban, suburban, rural and remote – wonder where in their communities they would find a certified athletic trainer if such were mandated everywhere.
NATA’s earlier recommendations in the extreme for acclimatization of players at the start of the football season have already resulted in a state law in Maryland that football coaches there criticize for leading to a less safe sport now that they have less time to teach technique and prepare players for first-game contact. In theory, NATA’s notions are nice ideas; but in practice, they are less safe for the participants. And anything that is less safe for the participants not only endangers today’s players, it also jeopardizes the future of the game. Which, by the way, does nothing to enhance employment opportunities for trainers.