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Seeking Serious Solutions

April 13, 2018

Too much time is being spent on season-ending tournaments, and too little time on the regular season, and practice, and making sports heathier, and promoting student engagement, and the role of sports in schools.

There are exceptions, of course.

  • The Michigan High School Athletic Association Soccer Committee is a rarity, expressing that there may be too much competition and not enough practice and rest in school-based soccer.

  • The MHSAA Competitive Cheer Committee is constantly looking for the right balance of athleticism and safety – a blend that will challenge the best and grow the sport among the rest.

  • The MHSAA Junior High/Middle School Committee is tackling large, tough topics and beginning to make culture-changing proposals to carry the brand of school sports to younger students.

These are examples of the conversations of which all school-based sports leaders must have much more.

Because our standing committees have often failed us and spent too much time on matters of too little consequence, the MHSAA has often resorted to special task forces or work groups to help get necessary things done.

  • This is how Michigan got ahead of the curve on the length of football practices and the amount of contact. A task force was appointed when the football coaches association and the MHSAA Football Committee were ineffective.

  • Years ago, it wasn’t a standing committee but a work group that brought us the eligibility advancement provision for overage 8th-graders.

  • That’s how cooperative programs came to our state.

  • That’s how we got coaches education started, and it’s how we extended coaches education to apply to more coaches on more topics.

  • This is how we are making progress now – a Task Force on Multi-Sport Participation, and a Work Group on the Transfer Rule.

We need more of this – small groups diving deeply into topics over multiple meetings. Educational athletics has significant problems that require serious solutions, and new strategies for seeking those solutions.

Attending to Football

November 29, 2013

The interscholastic football season comes to an end this weekend with the MHSAA Finals at Ford Field, but the most talked about sport in high schools today will continue to make headlines for many months into the future.

Some of the headlines will introduce topics that are merely footnotes compared to what is really most important, that being the efforts to keep school-sponsored football the safest and sanest brand of football in America.

At the center of these efforts has been a task force appointed by the MHSAA to work throughout 2013 to advance these two objectives:  “To promote the value of interscholastic football and to probe for ways to make the sport safer in Michigan.”

The tangible results of the task force’s four meetings are these:

    • A proposal to the MHSAA Representative Council to revise football practice policies to improve acclimatization of players and to reduce head trauma. The proposal goes to the Representative Council Dec. 6 for discussion, then to the Michigan High School Football Coaches Association and MHSAA Football Committee in January and to the MHSAA League/Conference meeting in February, before returning to the Representative Council for action on March 22.

    • Three proposals to the NFHS Football Rules Committee to modify playing rules to promote player safety.

    • A variety of print, online and broadcast promotions on behalf of the value of interscholastic football and its safety record and to encourage healthier out-of-season activities by students in all sports.

MHSAA research informs us that participation in 11- or 8-player football in member high schools this fall was down 3.0 percent compared to 2012, and down 7.63 percent since the 2008 season. The biggest reasons cited by those surveyed are, in declining order, safety issues, declining enrollment, athletes playing other school or non-school sports, cultural changes and pay-to-participate.

It is important to note that participation is not declining everywhere, not even everywhere where enrollments are down and participation fees are up. It is important to note also that some other sports are in much greater decline than football in terms of high school participation.

It is difficult for me to imagine my life without football as a part of it. It’s difficult to imagine schools and communities without football. I very much doubt that the absence of football would have improved my life or the schools and communities I’ve been a part of. It’s a sport that needs our attention, not its extinction.