Logo

Sportsmanship is a Way of Life

January 4, 2013

Twenty years ago the MHSAA received a plaque from a member school that I continue to prize above all other awards our organization has received.  The plaque reads:  “In recognition of outstanding contributions to interscholastic athletics, and for promotion of sportsmanship as a way of life for all young athletes.”

There are no words I would more prefer to describe the work of the MHSAA then and now than those highlighted words.  No work we do is any more important than promoting sportsmanship as a way of life.  Reduced to a phrase, that’s our most essential purpose; that’s our product.

Not victories, titles or championships, but sportsmanship.  Not awards or records, but sportsmanship.

It’s teaching and learning sportsmanship more than speed and strength; sportsmanship more than coordination and conditioning; sportsmanship more than skills and strategies.  Even more than teamwork, hard work, discipline and dedication, it’s sportsmanship we teach and learn.

In Discovery of Morals, the sociologist author (not a sportsman) writes, “Sportsmanship is probably the clearest and most popular expression of morals.  Sportsmanship is a thing of the spirit.  It is timeless and endless; and we should strive to make it universal to all races, creeds and walks in life.”

Sportsmanship is more than a list of do’s and don’ts; more than grace in victory and defeat; more than how we play the game and watch the games.  It’s how we live our lives.

Sportsmanship begins in our homes.  We work on it in practice.  It extends to games.  It reaches up to the crowd.  It permeates the school halls and shopping malls.  And it begins to affect society for good, or for bad.

Researching Reclassification

January 25, 2013

The MHSAA was the first state high school association in the U.S. to divide its member schools into enrollment groups for season-ending tournament play. Over the years, in one form or another, all other statewide associations have done the same; and in more recent years, some have tweaked their systems to facilitate practical considerations of tournament administration or to address demographic or political shifts among their memberships.

Two forces have combined to bring increased attention to the participation of public and nonpublic schools in the same tournaments: 

  • First, as state associations expanded the number of classifications to provide more opportunities for their schools to experience tournament success, the percentage of nonpublic schools winning those championships has increased.  Nonpublic schools rarely won any championships at all before the expansion to multiple classifications and especially to the additional expansion in football classifications.  Public schools are not winning fewer championships today than years ago; they are merely winning a lower percentage of the championships now provided.
  • Second, as state governments have reduced funding to public schools, those schools have been forced to reduce support for their sports programs and more often make them pay-as-you-go, much like nonpublic schools have operated for years.  As pay-for-play and fundraising have been popularized in public schools, their “marketing advantage” over nonpublic schools has been diminished.

Often overlooked by those who call for separate tournaments for public and nonpublic schools is the fact that the majority of nonpublic schools rarely have had any success in statewide tournaments, and some have never had any success at all.  An occasional District championship and a rare Regional trophy is the reality of most MHSAA member schools, both public and nonpublic. This, and the fact that "multipliers" have addressed only nonpublic schools and not also select-enrollment public schools (magnet, charter, choice), explains why MHSAA study groups have rejected the use of an automatic enrollment multiplier for nonpublic schools which is now in use in about 10 states.

Acknowledging the flaws of a multiplier that is applied only to nonpublic schools, a few states have been working with a formula, applied to all schools, that reduces the enrollment figures used for tournament play based on factors that may tend to reduce the percentage of a school’s enrollment likely to participate in sports.  For example, there is limited evidence that students who are on free and reduced lunch participate at a rate that is 10 to 14 percent lower than other students; so this is a factor reducing schools’ tournament enrollments in two states.  A third state association looked at this and decided that the data didn’t justify the effort.

Two other states have recently implemented a system that places schools in a classification for larger schools after they achieve a certain level of tournament success in the classification in which they would normally be placed.  Of course, critics of this type of system that address the “chronically successful” are quick to point out that this does nothing for the school which is successful in the largest classification and tends to “penalize” next year’s students for the success of the previous years’ teams.  Would it be right to force Ithaca High School into a higher classification in football in 2013 because it captured MHSAA titles in 2010, 2011 and 2012?  And what would be done with Detroit Cass Technical after back-to-back titles in Division 1 of the Football Playoffs?

About these topics nationwide, there is much talk, some action, and no consensus.