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Pay to Play

July 28, 2015

Our local newspaper recently reported that a group of 8-year-olds had qualified for a national 3-on-3 soccer tournament July 31 to Aug. 2 at a theme park resort in Florida; but the report said the team had to raise $5,000 for the privilege.

Without knowing it at the time, the players and coaches qualified on the basis of a second-place finish at a tournament last August in Hastings, Michigan. Really? Second place? Last year?

Let’s be frank. The basis for qualifying for this national event in Florida was not a runner-up finish in a tournament for 7-year-olds the previous summer in a small town in Michigan. The basis for qualifying was the ability to raise $5,000 so the resort could fill its hotel rooms and sell tickets to its theme parks.

National tournament? Baloney. If you can pay, then you can play. Sell this as an expensive family trip, perhaps; but as a national tournament, it has zero integrity.

This kind of hype and hypocrisy adds to the challenges of administering sane and sensible school sports. Neither 8- nor 18-year-olds need national tournaments. There’s a lot more bang for the buck in our own backyards.

Connecting with Coaches

January 28, 2014

In the coming weeks, the MHSAA will meet with the leadership of the high school coaches associations of our state. We have been doing this for more than 25 years, with two primary purposes.

First, we want to provide a forum for these leaders to share with one another their new ideas and initiatives and to discover “best practices” from one another, hoping that this will lead to the better plans being implemented in multiple organizations.

Our second purpose is to present some of the MHSAA initiatives or rules changes that are applicable to all or most sports. It’s not a time when we talk about the baseball pitching rule or the football playoff point system, but a time when we discuss topics of more universal application.

This year those topics included new requirements for coaches education, new rules for athletic-related transfers and proposed rules changes for international students, a simplified scrimmage rule for all sports, and a modified penalty for participation in certain all-star events.

It is intended that these coaches association leaders will be enabled to take these topics to their respective boards and members in order to increase understanding of proposed changes and to facilitate feedback to the MHSAA Representative Council and staff.