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The Safe Play Game Plan

April 21, 2015

On Feb. 10, bills were introduced into both the United States Senate and United States House of Representatives, together called the “Safe Play Act,” which addresses three of the four health and safety “H’s” described in my last posting: Heat, Hearts and Heads.

For each of these topics, the federal legislation would mandate that the director of the Centers for Disease Control develop educational material and that each state disseminate that material.

For the heat and humidity management topic, the legislation states that schools will be required to adopt policies very much like the “MHSAA Model Policy to Manage Heat and Humidity” which the MHSAA adopted in March of 2013.

For both the heart and heat topics, schools will be required to have and to practice emergency action plans like we have been promoting in the past and will be distributing to schools this summer.

For the head section, the legislation would amend Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments and would eliminate federal funding to states and to schools which fail to educate their constituents or fail to support students who are recovering from concussions. This support would require multi-disciplinary concussion management teams that would include medical personnel, parents and others to provide academic accommodations for students recovering from concussions that are similar to the accommodations that are already required of schools for students with disabilities or handicaps.

This legislation would require return-to-play protocols similar to what we have in Michigan, and the legislation would also require reporting and record-keeping that is beyond what occurs in most places.

This proposed federal legislation demonstrates two things. First, that we have been on target in Michigan with our four Hs – it’s like they read our playbook of priorities before drafting this federal legislation.

This proposed federal legislation also demonstrates that we still have some work to do.

Transfer Trends

October 15, 2013

A glance at the handbook of any statewide high school athletic association informs you that transfers have been the most problematic eligibility issue across the country over the years. In the MHSAA Handbook there are 12 high school athletic eligibility regulations covered over 25 pages, and one-fourth of these pages are devoted to one rule: the transfer regulation.

The MHSAA’s transfer rule casts a broad net over the turbulent waters of school sports . . .

  • Waters stirred by the inherent nature of athletics where people often look for competitive advantage, and sometimes look for it in inappropriate places;
  • Waters made more choppy by the domestic discord in which increasing numbers of students reside; and
  • Waters made rougher still by economic hardships in which more families seem trapped.

Add to this bullying, cyber bullying and hazing from which students seek to escape, and transfers seem epidemic.

Because the transfer regulation catches some “fish” in its wide net that it should not snare, schools have a mechanism to request waivers from the Executive Committee. Last school year, 352 waiver requests were made and 265 were approved.

It is readily admitted that the net fails to snatch some fish that it should catch and withhold from competition for a semester or longer. The most obvious and egregious of those occur when a student changes schools for reasons related to sports and without compelling medical or family reasons. More of those will be snared beginning in 2014-15, and those that are will face a period of ineligibility that is twice as long as other students who are ineligible under the basic transfer rule.

The new rule (click here and go to Appendix B in the Summary of RC Action) links extended ineligibility after a transfer to certain activities before the transfer. If a student played high school sports during the previous 12 months and did one of the “linking” activities to the new school, and if that student is ineligible for one semester under the basic transfer rule (none of the 15 automatic exceptions applies), then the period of ineligibility is doubled in the sport in which the links exist: two semesters instead of one.

This is not the end of the story, but merely the next chapter to develop and administer a transfer rule that facilitates quick eligibility for more deserving situations and extended ineligibility for more athletic related changes.