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The Needle

March 2, 2012

Jordan Cobb is one of the MHSAA’s superbly talented staff members; and one of his many duties may intrigue you.

Jordan watches “the needle.” 

The “chartbeat” needle tells us, at any moment, how many visitors we have to MHSAA.com.  It even tells us what page they’re viewing on MHSAA.com, how they got there, and where they’re located in the world.

Not so long ago, Jordan would fret on a Friday night in the fall that our servers did not have the capacity to handle all those looking for game scores.  Through lots of creative programming and work-arounds, and an in-house eight-unit “server farm” that shifts and spreads loads to accommodate peak demands, Jordan now watches the needle more in wonder than with worry.

On most Friday nights during the fall and winter, and for the entire months of November and March, MHSAA.com is among the one percent most visited U.S. websites – on any topic, not just sports.

Even on a quiet weekday afternoon, there will at all times be one to two hundred viewers navigating MHSAA.com.

A decade or two ago, the MHSAA office would not receive two hundred telephone calls per day or two hundred letters per week.  Now, every second of the workday and long into the evening and all weekend long, one hundred to one thousand people or more are making contact with the MHSAA at MHSAA.com.

So MHSAA.com deserves our attention and resources.  It is creating first and lasting impressions.  It is branding us, and doing so far beyond the walls of schools and the borders of our state.

Most importantly, it is demonstrating what we value.  It is conveying messages about who we are, what we do and what we believe.  And providing a stark contrast to who we are not and what we don’t do and don’t believe.

No Easy Fix

February 13, 2015

“If we don’t fix this problem, even our friends and allies may turn against us.”

That was the dire warning one of the MHSAA staff members gave to the rest of us at a weekly staff meeting recently, during which this staff member was receiving emails from people appalled over the mid-season transfer of a basketball player from one school to another.

The “fix” that some people want is a rule that makes every transfer student ineligible for a full year, regardless of the reason for the change of schools or the circumstances of the student. Of course, that rule would never survive judicial scrutiny, and legislators in every corner of the state would be advocating change for the sake of one child or another.

A more moderate remedy is to utilize a rule that applies the full-year period of ineligibility to those students whose circumstances do not fit one of the already established 15 exceptions that make a student eligible without delay following a transfer. That half-measure would not stop many transfers that would still frustrate people, and it would snag many transfers that would continue to anger people.

The rules we already have in place are tools for schools to use to stop many of the transfers that frustrate without snaring those transfers that anger: the athletic-motivated transfer rule and especially the athletic-related transfer rule (or links law).

Before our friends and allies turn their backs on us, they need to turn in the transfer situations where the rules already apply, and the undue influence (recruiting) they can document. They need to give the system a chance to work to the full extent of its potential. We should not make tougher rules if schools fail to utilize the rules they already have.

Adopting rules is usually easy for the organization. Applying rules is often much harder for the schools.