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Reality Check

July 7, 2015

The organization I worked for immediately prior to this 29-year run with the MHSAA utilized “harnessed hero worship” as its principal strategy for evangelism. It was generally effective; but because of human frailties, some of the heroes would disappoint us and disrupt the important work.

This experience and others over the years have caused me to, at most, only feign excitement when someone suggests we get this or that “Big Name” to keynote a conference or endorse an initiative. I prefer substance over style, and staying power over shooting stars.

All of this likely made me susceptible to shouting “Right On” when I read the May 14, 2015 blog post of Matt Amaral, a teacher in California. The title: “Dear Steph Curry, Now That You Are MVP, Please Don’t Come Visit My High School.”

Regarding celebrity worship, Mr. Amaral writes that we need less of it.

“Coming to poor high schools like mine isn’t going to help any of these kids out; in fact, it might make things worse.”

Amaral explains that unlike Curry (who is an example and not a target), the students he teaches are not genetic giants and do not have the resources and support that separate the less than one percent from the rest of us. “What you won’t see,” Amaral writes in his “open letter” to Curry, “is the fact that most of these kids don’t have a back-up plan for their dream of being you.”

“They are already very good at dreaming about being rich and famous; what we need them to do is get a little more realistic about what is in their control. We need less of an emphasis on sports and celebrity in high school, because it is hurting these kids too much as it is.”

(You can find more of Mr. Amaral’s provocative thoughts at teach4real.com.)

Who’s the Customer?

February 18, 2014

“If you ask your board, ‘who are your customers?’, you are likely to hear a lot of comments and no consensus.” That’s what I heard a speaker say to a group of association leaders last summer; and it has set me on a course of asking different groups this question: “Who is/are the MHSAA’s customers?” We allow respondents to allocate up to 100 points so they can give weight to their responses. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

The board of directors of the Michigan Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association (MIAAA) rated athletic directors as the top customer of the MHSAA (by a wide margin), followed in order by student-athletes, coaches and officials.

By an even wider margin, the MHSAA Student Advisory Council named student-athletes as the MHSAA’s top customer, followed by athletic directors and coaches tying for a distant second, and officials an even more distant fourth.

And the MHSAA’s governing body, the Representative Council, agreed that student-athletes are the top customer. Athletic directors were second, coaches third and officials fourth.

I suppose that when we ask audiences of coaches or officials or principals or others who they believe is or are the MHSAA’s customer(s), there will be some variation in the order of things. But I think we can already discern a comfortable pattern so far: everyone puts a premium on student-athletes. And that’s as it should be.

The MHSAA is unique among the state’s educational groups – we’re not an association of school boards only, or superintendents only, or principals only, or athletic directors or coaches or any other single group. We’re an association of schools, undertaking to represent all those groups and student-athletes themselves.