A Service Ace
October 18, 2011
I don’t write much about high school tennis, but I probably should.
It’s a terrific “lifetime” sport. It’s a sport we can play into our “golden years;” and, without officials to make the calls, it also has the potential to teach lifetime values.
But no sport we administer gives us more headaches. Too often we encounter overly-involved parents and under-involved school administrators; and we’re not certain if one doesn’t cause the other.
It’s a sport that brings chronic complaints of coaches “stacking” lineups. So serious have the allegations been for so long that the MHSAA actually convened a group and hired a professional facilitator to try to resolve some of the problems, without much success.
It’s a sport that devotes hundreds of hours to seeding; and while the seeds almost always hold up, criticism flies fast and furious for several days each fall and spring following the boys and girls seeding committee meetings.
We are fortunate that the MHSAA’s administrator for tennis, Gina Mazzolini, has the perspective that, in spite of everything, it’s really only a small percentage of people involved who create the majority of problems. It is, in fact, according to Gina, a fine educational experience for the vast majority of students involved.
This “big picture” perspective that Gina exhibits is what allows administrators at the local and statewide levels to remain passionate about their service no matter how prominent or persistent the problems seem.
The Complaint Department
May 26, 2015
The MHSAA office is one of the few places of business a person can telephone and still be greeted by a real live person.
Our real live person, Laura Roberts (no relation), has become a favorite of many MHSAA member school employees and registered officials because of her friendliness and command of facts. However, I recently overheard Laura say that the most frequent way she is greeted by other callers is, “I want to register a complaint.”
What is frustrating to Laura, and to the rest of the MHSAA staff, is that the caller’s complaint is so often about something the MHSAA is without authority and responsibility to fix. For example ...
- Complaints about coaches’ decisions regarding who makes the team and who gets playing time or who is playing what position are misdirected to the MHSAA. The MHSAA does not hire or supervise any coach, and has no authority to intervene in such matters as these; yet the parents’ complaints of this type come often to the state level when they should never ascend above the local school level.
- Complaints about officials’ decisions during the regular season are misdirected to the MHSAA. The hiring of contest officials outside of MHSAA tournaments is outside the authority of the MHSAA.
- The same is true regarding the days and times that regular-season contests are held.
- The same is true relative to the facilities utilized for regular-season events.
- Complaints about student conduct or training rules are misdirected to the MHSAA. Local boards of education jealously guard their sole authority to determine and enforce rules related to drinking, smoking and good citizenship.
- Complaints about all-state teams are misdirected to the MHSAA, which has never named a single all-state team in any sport. Sometimes it’s a media group which names these teams; sometimes it’s a coaches association; but it’s never the MHSAA which does so; and neither the media nor coaches associations answer to the MHSAA on such matters.
On these and other topics, the MHSAA is the misdirected target of daily complaints from those who want to better understand why things happen as they do in their niche of school sports. Because there are new constituents to school sports every year, it will be a never-ending test of our patience and professionalism.