Soccer for Schools
January 22, 2016
International soccer has provided me the greatest experience I’ve ever had as a sports spectator. Watching the Boca Juniors come back to win 2-1 in overtime in their historic stadium in Buenos Aires in November 2013 provided me an almost out-of-body experience as the home team fans, decked out in blue and yellow and waving flags, sang their way through the lows and dramatic highs of this match.
Soccer has been called “the beautiful game.” But of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder; and not all sports fans see beauty in a game that, at its highest levels, has so little scoring and so much flopping, and only one person knows how much time remains in the game. And of course, the sport has been supervised at the highest levels by individuals so corrupt that they make the recent scandals of this nation’s Amateur Athletic Union leadership seem like child’s play.
Soccer is a global game, and we – at the high school level – are not going to change the game at its highest level in the U.S. I don’t really care. I just want a more appropriate game for the interscholastic level.
We already have altered the global game’s substitution rules for the interscholastic level to promote greater participation and player safety. And we use a scoreboard that lets teams and spectators know how much time remains in each half.
To promote more safety, we could implement a football style practice policy that limits the number of practices when heading the ball can occur to one per day during the preseason and to two per week during the regular season.
To promote more scoring, we could implement a basketball style “over-and-back” rule at the midfield line, and also by prohibiting defenders from playing the ball to their own goalkeepers.
The beautiful game has imperfections – at least for our purposes – which we have corrected for our needs in the past and we can do more of in the future without challenging the global juggernaut that soccer has become.
International Affairs
January 21, 2014
On Sept. 10, 2013, I wrote in this space what I later spoke at MHSAA Update Meetings across Michigan: that we had to assure that the increasing numbers of international students who are arriving in Michigan do so without undue influence and without upsetting the competitive balance between MHSAA member schools in interscholastic athletics. Both matters concern me even more today than last fall.
A 1996 federal law allows international students to attend nonpublic schools for any number of years and to do so at reduced tuition, but the law limits international students’ attendance at public schools to one year and requires they make full payment of all fees and expenses. This is creating an unlevel playing field in school sports.
These aren’t J-1 visa foreign exchange students cleared and placed for a single academic year by programs that have been approved by the Council on Standards for International Educational Travel. These are students on F-1 visas, which increased from 6,541 in 2007 to 65,452 in 2012, arriving in dozens of different ways and remaining for two, three or four years. These are not "blind" placements; they are arranged.
By this means, some small private schools have been balancing their budgets by increasing their enrollments by 10 to 20 percent and even more with an influx of international students, while still remaining under the Class D or Division 4 maximum for MHSAA tournament classification.
And making matters much worse, a few private schools of all sizes are receiving especially talented or tall students through arrangements made by parents of players and/or others associated with their school and/or AAU and college programs.
When we learn, for example, that people with basketball connections are arranging for students to come to Michigan, when they are directing these students to schools where these adults have connections, when in some cases these people are paying portions of the tuition and/or providing for living arrangements for these students, we have undue influence, plain and simple. These students lose eligibility; the adults involved must be disassociated with the schools; and the schools are penalized if they haven’t handled things as they should have.
But this is just putting a patch on the bigger problem – which is placing the same limits on international student attendance, regardless of the type of visa they have, or the type of school in which they enroll.
By next August, this association must have a rule that provides immediate eligibility for one year for all international students (whether J-1 or F-1) who are placed blindly in schools through CSIET-listed programs; and if they remain beyond that one year, then they must sit out one year. All other international students, except those who relocate with their family unit, should have no eligibility at the varsity level at any time.