A Meaning-Driven Brand
June 5, 2012
One of the apparent conclusions of the MHSAA online “Have Your Say” opinion poll conducted five years ago that continues to guide us today, is that the character of school sports is key to the appeal of school sports. This is true for both sponsoring school personnel and for those participants and spectators regularly involved in school sports. This suggests that to keep our core customers, we must preserve our core characteristics. That whatever changes occur in school styles and structures, we must maintain by our policies and programs the features and values which our core customers have experienced and both want and expect to continue.
It may sometimes feel that we are swimming against the current of public opinion when we enforce rules that define student eligibility or the limits of competition and travel, but the development and implementation of such restrictions might be essential to the expectations of our core constituents for the experience they remember for themselves and want for their children or team.
Just because schools change, it is not necessary that rules of school sports change as well. Sometimes, perhaps. But not always or even often. Leadership must always consider the program without a rule before we do away with the rule.
It is not too strong to state that schools seek MHSAA membership precisely because there are rules. In fact, schools formed the MHSAA to be their vehicle for making and enforcing rules. Just as participation by students is more valuable to them and their schools where standards of eligibility and conduct are higher, so is membership by schools in an organization more valuable where such standards are developed and enforced.
The Culting of Brands is a good book with a bad title in which author Douglas Atkin writes about the success of “a meaning-driven brand.” He says, “The product carries the message and then becomes it.” These kinds of brands, he says, are really beliefs. “They have morals – embody values.” They “stand up for things. They work hard; fight for what is right.”
Ultimately, it is exactly this that is expected of the high school brand of competitive athletics in Michigan.
Reality Check
July 29, 2016
In Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, “all the children are above average.” The greater fiction is that most parents believe their children are way above average, especially when it comes to sports. On that topic most parents are badly in need of a reality check.
A colleague at the MHSAA showed me a letter from the CEO of the Amateur Athletic Union to my colleague’s eight-year-old daughter announcing that she had been selected for a national publication that would identify the brightest future stars of women’s basketball, for a fee of course. A scam certainly; but how many other people might be taken in by this, or contribute to it “just in case” because they wouldn’t want to do anything to discourage their child’s ascension to stardom?
The MHSAA’s Task Force on Multi-Sport Participation has identified delusional parents as one of the greatest contributors to athletic specialization that is too early and intense, forcing some children out of sports too soon and leading them toward a life of inactivity and obesity, while leading the chosen youth toward overuse injuries that can be equally damaging to adult fitness.
This task force is developing strategies to help inform parents of elementary children that their children will almost certainly not participate in either college or professional sports but, with adequate attention to physical fitness, nutrition and sports sampling, most children can be involved in interscholastic athletics and remain active and fit for life after high school.
Among several task force strategies are a “Reality Check” video for parent meetings and printed pieces on “What Parents Should Know” with units by medical personnel, physical educators and coaches.
These efforts won’t change the world. They are, however, a small part of what we can do, have an obligation to do and will do to promote the health and safety of this and the next generation of young people.