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The Scholar-Athlete Profile

February 11, 2014

We are well aware that the multi-sport athlete is not as common today as a decade or two ago, but the species is far from extinct. And for the foreseeable future, the policies and procedures of educational athletics will be tailored much more to their needs than to the single-sport specialist.

There were 1,701 applications for MHSAA Scholar-Athlete Awards this year. Of the 120 finalists, 75 are three-sport participants. The average sport participation rate of the 1,701 applicants is 2.16 sports, while the 120 finalists average 2.70 sports.

All 1,701 applicants met the minimum required 3.50 grade point average during their busy lives as student-athletes and all-around student leaders. All found the time to complete the required 500-word essay on the importance of sportsmanship in educational athletics.

Thirty-two of the 120 finalists have been judged by a statewide committee to receive $1,000 scholarships underwritten by Farm Bureau Insurance. This is the 25th year of the MHSAA’s partnership in this program with Farm Bureau, a program that emphasizes the importance of well-rounded students who excel in the classroom.

These 32 students are a justifiable point of pride for their schools and families. All 1,701 are representative of our goals at the MHSAA. For more on the Scholar-Athlete program click here.

Adversity

January 25, 2012

It’s been said that adversity causes some people to break and others to break records.

Author Keith McFarland spent seven years studying the performance of 7,000 companies, after which he made this pronouncement:  “The top performers had one thing in common.  Each went through a period of pronounced difficulty – often serious enough to threaten the firm’s existence.”

McFarland continued in The Breakthrough Company:  “Great companies, I discovered, arise not from the absence of difficulty but from its vortex,” its whirly mass.

The key during tough times, according to McFarland, is not to focus on survival, but instead to ask fundamental questions, to face facts that might have gone overlooked in more prosperous times, and to identify and integrate the new knowledge and insights that adversity can bring.

Schools and school sports, today in the vortex of adversity, may actually do more than merely survive our present difficulties if we too examine obstacles and opportunities previously overlooked, and then make positive use of the lessons that sometimes only adversity can bring.

A Scottish author of the 19th century with the optimistic name Samuel Smiles wrote:  “The very greatest things – great thoughts, discoveries, inventions – have usually been nurtured in hardship, often pondered over in sorrow, and at length established with difficulty.”