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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

Classification Comparisons

January 27, 2012

One of the ways statewide high school organizations evaluate their operations is to compare their policies and  procedures with similar organizations.  We do so cautiously, however, because there are so many variables – like population and number of schools, as well as the size, shape and location of the state.

We find that the most useful comparisons are with states of the upper Midwest and Great Plains and, even more so, with the statewide organizations of that region with a number of schools closest to our approximately 765 member high schools in Michigan.

By these criteria, Illinois, with about 780 high schools, and Ohio, with about 820 high schools, are most valuable to observe, while neighbors like Indiana and Wisconsin with about 400 and 500 high schools, respectively, are less valid measures for our work here.

Recently, to help the MHSAA Classification Committee have a larger view of tournament classification systems, we provided the Volleyball, Football and Basketball Tournament classifications of Illinois and Ohio, as well as our own:

  • All three states have four classifications in both volleyball and basketball, and only Ohio equalizes the number of schools in each class/division (as Michigan does in all sports except volleyball and basketball).
  • The enrollment ranges between the largest and smallest schools in the classification for the largest schools and the classification for the smallest schools (Classes A and D in Michigan) are much smaller in Michigan than in either Illinois or Ohio in volleyball and basketball.
  • In football, Ohio’s playoffs accommodate 192 football schools in six divisions determined prior to the regular season, while both Illinois and Michigan’s 11-player playoffs accommodate 256 schools in eight divisions determined at the end of the regular season.