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Second Half by MHSAA

Pulling Up the Welcome Mat?

September 8, 2011

Michigan’s welcoming foreign exchange program network and the MHSAA’s accommodating rules have caused there to be more placements in Michigan schools than any other state during each of the last two school years. But this open environment for foreign exchange students may change if the MHSAA is unsuccessful in defending its current rules through judicial proceedings in Michigan courts.

Presently under MHSAA rules, international transfer students are treated identically to domestic transfer students:  unless the student meets one of 15 stated exceptions, that student is ineligible for approximately one semester and then becomes eligible insofar as the transfer regulation is concerned until that student’s high school graduation.

If, however, this student is a foreign exchange student placed in an MHSAA member school through a program listed by the Council on Standards for International Educational Travel, that student is permitted immediate eligibility and that student’s eligibility is limited to one academic year.  This special exception for bona fide foreign exchange students is intended to maximize the benefits of their academic exchange year. 

The current court challenge is to the absolute limit of one year of athletic eligibility for foreign exchange students.  If the MHSAA is unsuccessful in preserving that one-year limit, schools may be forced to treat foreign exchange students as all other international transfer students who are ineligible for their first semester and thereafter eligible until graduation.

That solution may seem simple, but it would reduce the value of the academic exchange experience for bona fide foreign exchange students, and that would certainly drop Michigan from the top spot in the nation for foreign exchange student placements. 

In Others’ Words

August 22, 2014

I’ve read and heard multiple times – so I’ve come to believe it’s at least partly true – that one of the techniques that marketing departments or agencies use when developing campaigns to promote a product or service is to look at it from the consumer’s, customer’s or client’s perspective.

The point is often brought home that if management would use this technique as much as marketers, then management would be more effective and would label itself, rather than marketers, as the “creative team.” It chafes me to hear a CEO say he or she wants to know what “creative” has to say about a sponsorship initiative before the CEO will offer an opinion.

Thinking about what our customers want doesn’t require that leaders suspend their personal beliefs or reverse experience-based opinions. It merely asks that we look at things from a different and sometimes even opposite point of view. And to be truly revealing, it asks that we try to put into words where other people stand on a particular topic.

It asks us to actually try to describe what our customers see from where they stand and what they say they want. For example, in our work, it would ask administrators to think about and actually describe what coaches want, and vice versa. And it asks both coaches and administrators to think about and put into their own words what student-athletes want, and what their parents want.

This has been an ongoing part of my life, provoked I suppose by my marriage of 42 years to a woman whose political views often point 180 degrees from my own. And this approach has been especially enlightening on school sports’ most troublesome topics, some of which we are tackling at this time, like ...

  • Out-of-season coaching rules
  • Junior high/middle school programming
  • Health and safety mandates