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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.

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.