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Stacking

December 19, 2014

Many in the interscholastic tennis community of this state have complained for years about the unethical practices of a small number of coaches who “stack” their lineups so that their better players compete in lower flights to increase their chances of success in advancing and earning points for their teams.

The current meet scoring system, which fails to reward teams for placing players at the highest levels, invites the problem. Appealing to personal integrity works with most coaches, but not all; so the issue of stacking festers, and it frustrates many coaches.

Hearing this pain, in 2009 the MHSAA convened a group of tennis coaches to discuss stacking. We utilized a paid professional facilitator. One obvious outcome was very little support to solve the problem by restructuring the tennis meet scoring system to disincentivize stacking.

The simple solution – to modify the meet scoring system to provide more team points for Number 1 singles than Number 2, and for Number 2 more than Number 3, etc. – was a double fault with the clear majority of the coaches assembled in 2009.

Of course, simple solutions rarely are so simple. And with this scoring system solution comes the likelihood that stronger teams move even further out of reach of their challengers. Other critics are uncomfortable with giving one student-athlete a higher potential team point value than another.

If those and other objections are the prevailing sentiment, then a new scoring system won’t be in our future. And stacking still will be.

Mixed Messages

November 27, 2013

One of the very few enjoyable aspects of waiting in an airport is the guiltless time it allows me to visit its bookstores and page slowly through some of the old classics I vaguely remember and the new releases I can’t wait to read.

Two months ago in one of the terminals of Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, my attention went quickly to a prominent display of books about football. Five titles were mostly critical of the game, focusing on the sport at the major college and professional levels. Down at the bottom of the display was one title that addressed the positive value of football to students, schools and communities.

One month ago, while I was eating breakfast, the television news reported on the results of new research about youth concussions. While the narration mentioned multiple sports, the video was mostly of football. I saw that story repeated on another television channel that evening. I wondered, how many times on how many channels did how many people get this gift of the latest youth concussion statistics for all sports presented in football-only wrapping paper?

The public is getting mixed messages about school-sponsored football. The problem of college and professional football is not the problem of school-sponsored football. And what problems of head trauma that do exist in school sports are not exclusively problems of football.

In fact, school-sponsored football has never been freer of serious injury than it is today – that’s true whether we are talking about heads, necks, knees or nicks. It’s the result of the most careful and cautious rules making, coaching and officiating ever. And it’s safer – not less so – as we ever more quickly assess and refer injuries to ever more educated and capable health care professionals.