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Special Delivery

February 23, 2016

If there is one month of the year that demonstrates the difference in the MHSAA today compared to a generation ago, it is February.

  • This is the month when 775 people, including more than 700 students, gathered for the MHSAA Women in Sports Leadership Conference in Lansing. This year’s was the 22nd edition of the conference.

  • This is the month when the 120 finalists and 32 recipients of the 2016 MHSAA Scholar-Athlete Award are announced. This is the program’s 27th year, sponsored by Farm Bureau Insurance.

  • This is the month when MHSAA staff is on the road to visit finalists for “Battle of the Fans V,” and thousands of students vote for their favorite on social media, and the MHSAA Student Advisory Council finalizes the selection of this year’s top cheering section.

For most of its history, the MHSAA worked with school personnel who then interacted with students. Today, the MHSAA delivers much more than its postseason tournaments directly to student-athletes, including captains clinics and sportsmanship summits all year round.

While this work must never displace from our top priority the development and delivery of eligibility competition standards that are safe and sound for an educational environment, these direct interactions inform the rules making process in very positive ways.

Culture of Excellence

October 20, 2015

What are the marks of excellence in a high school’s extracurricular activities program that set the most welcoming schools apart? What are they doing to create and perpetuate a culture of excellence in good behavior?

Our counterpart organization in the state of Washington invited the MHSAA and other state high school associations to consider these questions, and to offer examples which would help to recognize the best practices of schools that have a tradition of excellence in good behavior and a welcoming environment.

We discovered that our initial thoughts were like skipping stones on a pond. They barely skimmed the surface of this topic, and we quickly plunged more deeply than answers like comfortable venues, convenient parking, friendly signage, staff assigned to greet contest officials and visiting teams, and upbeat cheering sections.

We concluded that all of these welcoming attributes are the result of committed leadership that communicates clearly and consistently about the expectations of educational athletics, and these expectations are exceptional in how different they are than at every other level of sports.

What is abundant in these schools and scarce in less-welcoming schools is the appointment, and continued training and support, of a full-time athletic administrator who spends all day, every day on the interscholastic program.

And this athletic administrator provides ongoing training and support to coaches, as well as to team captains and other student leadership.

These are the schools where the MHSAA Coaches Advancement Program is provided time and time again to coaches. These are the schools where students have attended the MHSAA’s Team Captains Clinics, Sportsmanship Summits and Women in Sports Leadership Conferences. This is where the School Broadcast Program is providing events regularly and promoting the school proudly.

Simply put, these are schools where administrators are dedicated to creating a proper perspective of school-sponsored, student-centered sports, and spend time on this daily. They have gone beyond signs and slogans to the much more difficult (but more rewarding) work of nurturing better leaders out of coaches and athletes, individual by individual, week after week, season after season.