The Old Is New Again
October 23, 2015
In the hidden back reaches of my closet at home I’ve kept some ties, suits and pants I have not worn for many years, forgotten as I purchased or was given newer and more fashionable clothes. Needing space, and heeding my wife’s suggestion that it was time to donate what I never wear, I gave my wife a fashion show of my long-neglected wardrobe. I wanted her help to decide what to discard.
Some of the items I modeled brought back memories of happy times, like weddings and reunions; others of sadder times, like funerals. Some items were laughably out of style. But, surprisingly, some of the oldest items looked the best ... almost as good as the most recent additions to my wardrobe. They were, in fact, back in fashion.
This caused me to recall that some of the discarded policies of educational athletics are working their way back in fashion. For example …
- For many years, even after many states changed their rules, the MHSAA was criticized for prohibiting member schools’ students from wearing full equipment at and participating in the full-contact summer football camps of universities and commercial organizations. Now, with greater attention to improving acclimatization and reducing head contact in football, other states are returning to the policies we never discarded: contact-free out-of-season football camps and clinics.
- Equally “dishonored” by those who believe there is never too much of a good thing have been MHSAA rules that limit the number of contests and the distance of travel. After years of more and more of everything, the new normal of severely limited school sports budgets makes our modest schedules more virtuous than ever.
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For many years, MHSAA policy has stood apart from most states by limiting students to competing in only one level of a sport in a single day … no JV and varsity in the same day, no fifth or sixth quarter rule. Now, with even greater attention to reducing head and overuse injuries and other student health and safety issues, our rules look both protective and progressive, not overly restrictive.
If a man waits long enough, even his narrowest tie or widest lapel will be back in fashion; so what makes me cling to old clothes also makes me think twice about changing established rules. It is just as difficult to restore a discarded rule as it is to wear a discarded jacket.
It’s always easier to relax a policy than to restore it when we rediscover we need it.
Transfers
January 10, 2017
When it comes to transfers, the staff of the Michigan High School Athletic Association gets lots of advice, but it comes from opposing directions.
One camp thinks MHSAA rules are inadequate. This group suggests that we expand the basic period of ineligibility from approximately 90 days to 180 days and/or it wants the MHSAA to eliminate most or all exceptions that allow for immediate eligibility of a transfer student.
This first camp is so frustrated with high-profile athletic-motivated or related transfers that they want to clamp down on all transfers.
The other camp thinks parents have the right and responsibility to send their children to any school they wish and have immediate access to the full benefits of that school’s curricular and extracurricular offerings.
This second camp is encouraged by the laws of Michigan which have gradually extended “schools of choice” as an option that all school districts may exercise. And this camp will be emboldened if the Secretary of Education under the new regime in Washington, D.C. is the long-time schools of choice advocate who has been nominated by the President-Elect for this position.
This second camp is on the right side of history, no matter how much I dislike it and no matter how convinced I am that the better way to have improved public education would have been to invest more in neighborhood schools. Improving them builds most communities. Ignoring them, as we have for 25 years, sends surrounding communities into downward spirals that worsen poverty and public health.
The ill-advised efforts to improve education by enticing students out of their neighborhoods to attend schools elsewhere has undermined “local ownership” in schools; and it has had the side effect of encouraging more transfers motivated by or related to athletics. Monitoring and managing such transfers is made more difficult by these educational reforms; but the new world will not tolerate transfer rules that are seen as too broad and contrary to what has become public policy, however poorly conceived and executed.
The fact is, the future of the transfer rule will be less about extending its reach and more about retaining its existence.