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.
Standards Promote Value
October 29, 2012
I can’t speak for every state, but it is probably true for most states, that (1) no school is required to provide a program of interscholastic activities – such are not curricular activities; and (2) participation in voluntary interscholastic competitive activities is a privilege offered to those who meet standards of eligibility and conduct of the school and standards of ability for the activity involved.
It is not a liability but an asset of competitive interscholastic activities that they are not co-curricular, but extracurricular – voluntary programs with extra standards, extra requirements, extra expectations.
We don’t need to sell the public on the value of participation; they desperately want their children to participate, and they will even sue us for the opportunity. What we have to do is sell the public on the value of the standards we maintain for participation.
Much of the value of school activities results from the standards of school activities. Many of the benefits of school activities accrue from the requirements of school activities. Raise the bar, raise the value. Lower the bar, lower the value.
Activities are much less capable of doing good things for kids and good things for schools and their communities where there are lower standards of eligibility and conduct. It’s the difference between interscholastic and intramural, between tough and easy. It is because schools have raised the bar for interscholastic activities that these programs have value to students, schools and communities.