Starting Five
December 6, 2016
The Task Force on Multi-Sport Participation which the Michigan High School Athletic Association appointed early in 2016 has identified its top five projects. They all encourage the MHSAA and its member schools to get in the game earlier.
The Task Force wants the MHSAA to:
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Partner with groups which are promoting diverse physical activity for youth, like the NFL’s “Play 60” and the United Dairy Industry of Michigan’s “Fuel Up” programs.
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Meet with groups which could influence more and better physical education in schools that would encourage more sport sampling by youth and increased literacy in basic athletic skills and movements.
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Prepare tools for administrators to use when interviewing coaches, conducting preseason meetings for coaches and encouraging coaches to “walk the talk” of promoting balanced, multi-sport participation by members of their school teams.
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Prepare for junior high/middle school and elementary school parents a “What Parents Should Know” guidebook with units created by medical personnel, high school and college athletes and coaches, educators and sports scientists.
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Prepare for junior high/middle school and elementary school parents a “Reality Check” video describing the costs of sports specialization and the facts about sports as a path to college tuition assistance.
Those who love and lead school sports cannot wait until kids (and their parents) reach high school before we start talking with them regarding the values of school-sponsored sports, the benefits of multi-sport participation, and the meaning of success in educational athletics.
Our Open Tournament
April 15, 2016
One of the criticisms we hear as a result of not seeding the MHSAA Girls and Boys Basketball Tournaments is that it doesn’t allow the best teams to avoid one another until later rounds of the tournament and often leads to anticlimactic Semifinal and Final games.
But, after spending thousands of hours and perhaps a million dollars to seed its Division I men’s basketball tournament, the NCAA had a 17-point mismatch when a No. 10 seed met a No. 1 seed in one national semifinal and a 44-point blowout between a pair of so-called No. 2 seeds in the other national semifinal.
Seeding is such an imperfect art, and teams can play so unpredictably from one day to the next in a one-and-done tournament, that seeding is more of a publicity stunt than it is a science on which to structure a tournament.
To send a team and its fans packing to distant venues on the basis of its winning percentage and margins of victory relative to other teams is not responsible policy at the high school level. It could be unsound fiscally and unsound educationally.
Our high schools enjoy a format that allows every high school entry into the MHSAA’s postseason tournament every year. If we were to limit our tournament to only 68 teams like the NCAA, seeding might be more practical. But as long as we accommodate 750 high schools in our Boys Basketball Tournament and 750 in our Girls Basketball Tournament, geographical districts with blind draws may be most appropriate.
The NCAA tournament, like so much of major college sports, caters to the few and most fortunate; so maybe seeding is good in that environment. But our high school basketball tournaments are open to all schools, and they require we make different decisions to serve those schools.