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Money Matters

January 14, 2014

Every once in a while someone will take a potshot at the MHSAA by saying the organization is motivated by money.

My colleagues in leadership of high school associations in other states probably would get a chuckle out of reading that criticism because the reputation of the MHSAA and this executive director is the opposite. We’re seen as the conservative stick-in-the-muds who oppose national tournaments and promotions in spite of the money that could be made from them.

Here’s a good checklist to determine if “the almighty dollar” motivates a high school association:

  1. Does the association co-title its tournaments with the name of commercial sponsors?

  2. Do the association’s events, publications and websites look like a NASCAR production with corporate logos plastered everywhere?

  3. Does the association seed its basketball tournaments or gerrymander brackets to allow the teams with the better records (and usually larger crowds) to avoid playing each other for as long into the tournament as possible?

  4. Does the association charge admission prices that are more than a fraction of college and professional ticket prices, or just equal to the cost of a movie?

One or more “Yes” answers doesn’t mean an association has sold out; but if all answers are “No,” you can be sure that the association has other purposes for its decisions than making money.

And “No” is the correct answer to these questions in Michigan. In fact, the full answer to No. 4 is that the MHSAA has not raised ticket prices for either basketball or football at either the District or Regional tournament level for more than a decade.

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.