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On the Move

June 8, 2012

Two members of the MHSAA’s executive staff live on the same side of the same town.  Each lives less than a five-minute drive to the MHSAA building; and yet they live in differently named neighborhoods, taking the names of the public elementary schools which serve their sections of town and the school district.

Students of those two elementary schools feed the one and only public middle school of the district, which feeds the one and only public high school of the district.  Historically, there would not be too much to deter the children raised in these two homes from attending the same schools.

However, if one of the families is Catholic, it might choose to send its children to the Catholic grade school located across the street from the public high school.  And it might decide to send its children to high school at the Catholic high school in the town which neighbors to the west.

If one of the families were inclined, it might choose to home school its children before sending them to the district’s high school or to one of two Christian high schools nearby.

Or perhaps one of the families would choose to send one of their children to a charter school near the location of the mother’s employment.  Perhaps another child would be a school of choice student at a traditional high school convenient to the father’s place of work but in a different school district.  These are common occurrences today that were rare just 15 years ago.

A multitude of other factors could affect the choice of school:

  • One school might be better known than others for a particular curriculum strength, or it might have a strong reputation in drama or music or sports, or in one particular sport.
  • Children are more likely today to have mingled on non-school youth sports teams and to decide to stay together for high school teams.
  • High school students might attend the same summer camps and be attracted to a different group of kids or a coach, and transfer to join the new group or coach.
  • As families relocate more frequently, students are required to transfer; and as the nuclear family becomes less stable, students are more often forced to change domestic settings, and change schools.

These and other factors – some worthy or unavoidable, some unhealthy and contrived – add up to the following:

  • During the entire 1986-87 school year, the MHSAA Executive Committee processed 96 requests by member schools to waive eligibility rules, and 58 of those requests were for student transfers.
  • 25 years later, the total requests for the school year were 462; and of those, 337 were to waive the transfer section of the eligibility regulation.

This demonstrates in numbers what we have observed to be true:  that during the past quarter century, the clientele of high school athletics has become five times more mobile.  It’s one of school sports’ greatest challenges.

Limitations of Rules

November 15, 2013

Those who make rules ought to have knowledge of the limitations of rules, lest they overreach and over-regulate.

Dov Seidman writes in how:  Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything:  “Rules fail because you cannot write a rule to contain every possible behavior in the vast spectrum of human conduct. There will always be gray areas, and therefore, given the right circumstances, opportunities, or outside pressures, some people might be motivated to circumvent them. When they do, our typical response is just to make more rules. Rules, then, become part of the problem.”

The NCAA is under constant criticism for its voluminous rule book which seems to pry into myriad of daily activities of athletes, coaches, boosters and others with so many rules it’s impossible for people to know them all. So university athletic departments must hire compliance officers to guide people – effectively absolving the people in the trenches from knowing the rules and committing to their adherence; and the NCAA office must hire investigations to sort through all the allegations of wrongdoing.

While much trimmer than the NCAA Manual, the MHSAA Handbook is much larger today than its original versions. Still, every year in December when the MHSAA staff conducts a series of meetings that kicks off a six-month process of reviewing theHandbook, there is a concerted effort to “make the rules better without making the rule book larger.”

We know that unless the rules address a specific problem and are written with clarity and enforced with certainty, rules do more harm than they do good. “This,” according to Seidman, “creates a downward spiral of rulemaking which causes lasting detriment to the trust we need to sustain society. With each successive failure of rules, our faith in the very ability of rules to govern human conduct decreases. Rules, the principal arm of the way we govern ourselves, lose their power, destroying our trust in both those who make them and the institutions they govern.”