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.
Travel Bug
November 2, 2012
International trips for U.S. youth sports teams is a big business. Sometimes the target is school sports teams; and sometimes those schools and communities get foreign travel fever.
While I have nothing against international travel – in fact, it’s a hobby my wife and I enthusiastically share – I caution against international trips for teams or individual athletes.
Sometimes the competition is badly matched. Sometimes our teams encounter and are routed by another country’s “national team.” More often, our teams encounter poorly organized events and weak, thrown-together opposing teams and substandard venues. But that’s not the major concern here.
Several years ago, a Michigan community spent $23,000 to help send 20 baseball players from three of its high schools to participate overseas. That’s nice, but the school district didn’t have a junior high baseball program; and I wondered if the community fundraising might not have been used to provide new opportunities for more student-athletes.
About the same time, there was an effort to fund one basketball player from each of a league’s schools to compete in an international basketball tournament. The cost was $2,200 for each student; and again I wondered if those communities might not have uses for the money that could provide benefit to more student-athletes.
Why do we spend thousands on a few when the same amounts of money could restore or expand opportunities for many? Why do we focus on the fortunate few while the foundations of our programs rot through eliminated junior high programs and pay-for-play senior high programs?
No one can argue that some of these trips do some of our students some good. But do they offer enough good for the few at a time when many students aren’t being offered even the basic opportunities of interscholastic athletics?
Local leadership should say “No” to requests to support expensive international trips. There’s need for them to put more into the foundation of our programs and less into foreign travel.