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Predicting Success

March 1, 2016

Participation in high school sports, music and drama – the educational buffet provided by comprehensive, full-service high schools – did more to shape my character and chart my life journey than any factor other than my parents.

It is no wonder that this is so, for it is well-established that ...

  • Participation in school activities is a better predictor of success in later life than either standardized test scores or grade point average.

  • Participants in school activities have higher GPAs, lower dropout rates, better daily attendance and fewer discipline problems than non-participating students.

  • Participants in school athletics have higher GPAs and lower use of tobacco, alcohol and other drugs during their seasons of competition than out of season.

We don’t know for sure if all this is cause and effect; but we do know there is a strong statistical correlation, and most parents prefer to have their children hanging out with these motivated, high-achieving young people.

Corporate Care

March 10, 2015

One of the MHSAA’s newest corporate sponsors is arguably one of its most important ever because it will assist the MHSAA’s aspirations to go further beyond the ordinary in promoting student-athlete health and safety.

That new sponsor is Sparrow Health System, and you can read about our new relationship by clicking here.

During the many discussions with Sparrow’s leadership leading up to our partnership, we learned of its membership in the prestigious Mayo Clinic Care Network; and during our review of some of Mayo’s work we reviewed an April 2012 Mayo Clinic article about the risks of concussion in high school football.

The article presented the results of a carefully controlled study of individuals who played high school football in Rochester, Minnesota, during the decade 1946 to 1956.

The conclusion was that those participants did not have an increased risk of later developing dementia, Parkinson’s disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) compared to non-football-playing high school males. The study notes that this was the case even though, compared to today, “there was poorer equipment and less regard for concussions and no rules prohibiting head-first tackling (spearing).”

There is no small supply of data that sheds better light on the head trauma hysteria in sports in general and football in particular. We cite such data as a counter-balance, not as a reason to slow the search for safer ways to conduct school sports. Our new sponsorship is evidence that we are increasing our capacity to do much more.