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Our Tools

March 11, 2014

MHSAA staff does very many things, including these two tasks: (1) we use the tools we have; and (2) we strive to develop more effective tools.

The tools we have are limited. We don’t have a huge staff to conduct investigations. We don’t have subpoena power to coerce disclosure of testimony and documents. We don’t have rules to cover every situation.

Thus, it feels like some people get away with things; and sometimes they do. We don’t have the tools to catch them or convict them. That is the inescapable condition of every voluntary statewide athletic association in the US.

But the other thing we do is keep working on better tools. Rules with broader reach and/or fewer holes. Penalties that are a greater deterrent to some people, and more punitive to others when deterrence doesn’t work.

Developing new rules is a tough process. Sometimes it takes months or years to get membership buy-in. Sometimes the “no-brainers,” so-called “easy solutions,” get shot down by lawyers who demand the most narrow remedy to each and every excruciatingly detailed problem.

We work today with the tools we’ve been given through the democratic processes of our voluntary association. And we keep working on ways to sharpen and strengthen those tools in ways that are reasonable in breadth and depth, rationally related to the basic tenets of a voluntary association, one of which is local control. Obviously, these are two of the more difficult things we do.

Prep Prose

January 27, 2017

Mick McCabe retired in December after almost five full decades at the Detroit Free Press.

When Mick agreed with me, he did so boldly. When he disagreed, he sometimes did so brutally. 

He was at his best, and did most for school sports in Michigan, when he told the stories of coaches and athletes in the cities, suburbs and small towns all across our state. Especially when he told the stories of those who would never coach or play a game beyond the high school level. Especially when he found and focused on an unknown person in a low-profile sport who raised our spirits by reminding us of how good educational athletics can be.

Mick may have written more words about high school sports in Michigan than any person ever. And that's saying a lot when one remembers Jack Moss and Bob Gross and Bob Becker and Jane Bos and Del Newell and Cindy Fairfield and a dozen other retired sports writers in our state whose substantial bodies of work promoted prep sports.

School sports usually has been well-served by such media professionals who were allowed by their industry to take the time necessary to know the people and the policies that served school sports, and were allowed  the space to develop stories that went beyond headlines, tweets and texts, with fuller facts and closer truth than is the norm today.