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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.

We Need A Picture

December 18, 2012

One of our family traditions is to start and complete a new puzzle each Thanksgiving Day.  This past year’s 1,000-piece project tested our guests’ perseverance and, technically, it wasn’t completed on Thanksgiving, but just after 1 a.m. on the next day with only two of the original 16 guests still on task.

As is customary, the cover of the box in which the puzzle came provided a picture of the finished work.  Those working the puzzle kept passing the box top around to get closer looks at the specific portions of the puzzle that had their attention.

At one point my son mentioned how incredibly difficult it would be to complete a complicated puzzle without any picture.

Which caused me to consider that trying to solve any puzzle – any problem – is made almost impossibly difficult without a clear picture of what the solution should look like.  To put together the pieces of the solution to a problem requires at least some vision of the solution.