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Not In School Sports

June 5, 2015

When those involved in high-profile major college sports offer advice to us in lower profile but perhaps higher principled school sports, we can quickly lose our patience.

Why, for example, would we ever listen to scheduling suggestions for high school basketball from the higher level that schedules games every day of the week, at any time of the week, anywhere on this continent or another?

These behaviors in major college basketball describe an athletic program that is orphaned from the academic mission of the colleges and universities to which they increasingly have become disconnected. We can’t let that happen to school sports.

Major college athletics is in an “arms war” of escalating costs for extravagant facilities and exorbitant coaches’ salaries. Blinded by their own ballooning budgets, college folks’ foolish suggestions for more frequent and distant high school games would increase the operational costs in the athletic departments of struggling and sometimes bankrupt school districts. We can’t let that happen in school sports.

Only when major college sports gets its house in much better order will any of its people earn the slightest right to suggest new policies and procedures for school sports. For now, much of what we see in high-profile college sports shows us what we should not do, not what we should do, in high school sports.

Middle School Membership

September 27, 2013

Of the approximately 2,000 schools serving 7th- and 8th-grade students in Michigan, according to the 2013 Michigan Education Directory that does not include home schools, only 731 are members of the Michigan High School Athletic Association. There are several reasons that explain this gap.

It is not a matter of cost. As with high schools, junior high/middle school membership is free. More likely reasons for the gap between the number of schools serving 7th- and 8th-graders and the number of those schools belonging to the MHSAA are these:

  1. The school district overlooks MHSAA membership. This is often the case when there is no high school connected to the junior high/middle school.
  2. The school district does not sponsor interscholastic athletics at the 7th- and 8th-grade level. At that level, sports are community run, so the school sees no need for MHSAA membership.
  3. The school district does sponsor 7th- and 8th-grade sports but does not want to follow MHSAA rules. And among the rules these school districts object to are these:

  • The limits on the number of contests . . . they’re too few; and/or

    The prohibition of 6th-graders on teams of 7th- and 8th-graders.

This third reason, and especially these two objections, are being reviewed throughout the MHSAA constituency again this year. And I’ll have more to say in our next three postings.