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In Others’ Words

August 22, 2014

I’ve read and heard multiple times – so I’ve come to believe it’s at least partly true – that one of the techniques that marketing departments or agencies use when developing campaigns to promote a product or service is to look at it from the consumer’s, customer’s or client’s perspective.

The point is often brought home that if management would use this technique as much as marketers, then management would be more effective and would label itself, rather than marketers, as the “creative team.” It chafes me to hear a CEO say he or she wants to know what “creative” has to say about a sponsorship initiative before the CEO will offer an opinion.

Thinking about what our customers want doesn’t require that leaders suspend their personal beliefs or reverse experience-based opinions. It merely asks that we look at things from a different and sometimes even opposite point of view. And to be truly revealing, it asks that we try to put into words where other people stand on a particular topic.

It asks us to actually try to describe what our customers see from where they stand and what they say they want. For example, in our work, it would ask administrators to think about and actually describe what coaches want, and vice versa. And it asks both coaches and administrators to think about and put into their own words what student-athletes want, and what their parents want.

This has been an ongoing part of my life, provoked I suppose by my marriage of 42 years to a woman whose political views often point 180 degrees from my own. And this approach has been especially enlightening on school sports’ most troublesome topics, some of which we are tackling at this time, like ...

  • Out-of-season coaching rules
  • Junior high/middle school programming
  • Health and safety mandates

Football’s Future

March 20, 2012

Many folks, including me, will too often focus on the destination more than the trip.  More on results than process.  The end more than the means.

This is epidemic in sports, on all levels.  There’s so much focus on the postseason that it overshadows the regular season.

In contrast, in educational athletics, we are supposed to hold to the principle that opportunities for teaching and learning are as plentiful, maybe more so, in regular season as in tournaments, at subvarsity levels as at varsity, during practices as during games.

This disease affects football as much as any high school sport.  There’s been too much focus on the end of the season – playoffs.  Postseason tournaments have been the demise of many great Thanksgiving Day high school football classics across the country.  Playoffs continue to ruin rivalries and collapse conferences nationwide.

And, disturbingly, the focus on the end of the season misses what is most wrong with football, and may be most threatening to its future.  It’s practice.  Specifically, what’s allowed during preseason practice and then at practice throughout the season.

We can predict that, in high school football’s future, two-a-day practices will be fewer, practice hours will be shorter and activities will be different. Among proposals we will be presented (and should seriously consider) will be:

  • Increasing the number of days without pads at the start of the season from three days to four or even five.
  • Prohibiting two-a-day practices entirely, or at least on consecutive days.
  • Limiting the number of minutes of practice on any one day.
  • Restricting contact drills to a certain number of minutes each week.

If this all sounds silly or radical, remember that the NCAA and NFL are already making such changes.  NFL players face contact in practice on only 14 days during a 17-week regular season.  Meanwhile, many high school coaches have kids knocking heads and bruising bodies two to four days a week, all season long.  Giving critics the impression that interscholastic football for teens is more brutal than the higher levels of football for grown men.  Inviting interference from people who think they know better.

Actually, we know better; and we need to do better.  Soon.