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Out-Punting Our Coverage

March 19, 2013

Any traveler to the Atlantic coast of any Central American country will witness firsthand the arrogance of the human race.

Strewn along almost every shore is the waste of nations outliving their means.  Plastic in all shapes and colors, from products of all types – bottles, toys, sandals, tools.

Island nations to the east, unable to cope with the volume of their waste, cast it off covertly under cover of night.  Oceangoing vessels large and small heave it overboard.

My wife puts it this way:  “We’ve gotten ahead of ourselves.”  Humans have fantastic abilities to create, but we do so without conscience, without caring enough about consequences.

This clearly applies to the world’s waste problem – from cast-off containers to used cars to computers made obsolete in a matter of months.  We keep producing more and more, without plans for the waste of producing new products or the waste created by making existing things obsolete.

In the Pacific Ocean, a mass of trash the size of Texas is circulating as if there were a drain.  But there isn’t one.  No easy answer to flush human waste – the excrement of our greed – to some other place where it will do no harm.

In Chinese cities today the air, water and land are toxic – much as it was in developing US cities around 1900 – as China takes its turn to poison its people in the name of progress.

That we can do something doesn’t mean we should do it.  In sports terms, the human race has out-punted its coverage, and the consequences are far more dire than a punt return for a touchdown.

No Easy Fix

February 13, 2015

“If we don’t fix this problem, even our friends and allies may turn against us.”

That was the dire warning one of the MHSAA staff members gave to the rest of us at a weekly staff meeting recently, during which this staff member was receiving emails from people appalled over the mid-season transfer of a basketball player from one school to another.

The “fix” that some people want is a rule that makes every transfer student ineligible for a full year, regardless of the reason for the change of schools or the circumstances of the student. Of course, that rule would never survive judicial scrutiny, and legislators in every corner of the state would be advocating change for the sake of one child or another.

A more moderate remedy is to utilize a rule that applies the full-year period of ineligibility to those students whose circumstances do not fit one of the already established 15 exceptions that make a student eligible without delay following a transfer. That half-measure would not stop many transfers that would still frustrate people, and it would snag many transfers that would continue to anger people.

The rules we already have in place are tools for schools to use to stop many of the transfers that frustrate without snaring those transfers that anger: the athletic-motivated transfer rule and especially the athletic-related transfer rule (or links law).

Before our friends and allies turn their backs on us, they need to turn in the transfer situations where the rules already apply, and the undue influence (recruiting) they can document. They need to give the system a chance to work to the full extent of its potential. We should not make tougher rules if schools fail to utilize the rules they already have.

Adopting rules is usually easy for the organization. Applying rules is often much harder for the schools.