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Politics and Sports

April 3, 2012

The acrimonious, winner-take-all GOP presidential primary and a premature posturing for the general election campaigns in the fall caused Portland (OR)-based author Tom Krattenmaker to write in the March 26, 2012 USA Today:  “Many of us seem to engage in politics the same way we follow sports:  What strategy will it take for my team to stick it to the opponent . . . ?”

It saddens me to see that analogy.

If that’s the general opinion of sports in America, sports is failing its purposes, which at higher levels is to entertain the public, at lower levels is to provide for recreation and better health, and at our level is to help educate students.

If at all these levels, we do not find willing respect for excellent efforts and execution and graceful sportsmanship in winning and losing, leaders of sports on all levels are failing their principal duty.  If stick-it-to-them strategy is the prevailing theme of the enterprise of sports at any level, that enterprise is worthless, or worse.

Stacking

December 19, 2014

Many in the interscholastic tennis community of this state have complained for years about the unethical practices of a small number of coaches who “stack” their lineups so that their better players compete in lower flights to increase their chances of success in advancing and earning points for their teams.

The current meet scoring system, which fails to reward teams for placing players at the highest levels, invites the problem. Appealing to personal integrity works with most coaches, but not all; so the issue of stacking festers, and it frustrates many coaches.

Hearing this pain, in 2009 the MHSAA convened a group of tennis coaches to discuss stacking. We utilized a paid professional facilitator. One obvious outcome was very little support to solve the problem by restructuring the tennis meet scoring system to disincentivize stacking.

The simple solution – to modify the meet scoring system to provide more team points for Number 1 singles than Number 2, and for Number 2 more than Number 3, etc. – was a double fault with the clear majority of the coaches assembled in 2009.

Of course, simple solutions rarely are so simple. And with this scoring system solution comes the likelihood that stronger teams move even further out of reach of their challengers. Other critics are uncomfortable with giving one student-athlete a higher potential team point value than another.

If those and other objections are the prevailing sentiment, then a new scoring system won’t be in our future. And stacking still will be.