Logo

Stay Tuned

September 17, 2013

The 2012 MHSAA Update Meeting Opinion Poll revealed a lack of support for eliminating rules that restrict live video broadcasts of member schools’ regular-season contests.

That’s okay.  Unrestricted video broadcasting could adversely change the look and nature of educational athletics. Going slow may be going smart.

However, in the long term, we think we can manage live video broadcasts – even of some regular-season events – if we do two things:  (1) control the platform, and (2) charge for the product.

  • If we control the platform, and thus the brand and content, we control the look and feel. And we protect the message of high school sports.

  • If viewers pay to view the content through a subscription fee, we preserve the revenue from contest ticket sales and participate in the monetization of the video productions of those contests.

“Television” is rarely free to viewers today. Ninety percent of people who watch video broadcasts of sporting events today pay for that privilege through the basic package or add-ons of their monthly bill from a local cable provider or national satellite TV company. Many 20- and 30-somethings have cut the cable cord for television and access video programming from the Internet, paying for the specific events or packages they wish to watch.

With all this in mind, we are engaged with two video broadcasting initiatives.

The first is expansion of the School Broadcasting Program.  We are breathing new life into this four-year-old program during 2013-14 by providing more on-the-ground support. MHSAA staff is monitoring program quality, and we are designing educational and awards programs that will further distinguish this program from all other school broadcasting options. There is now an option for live broadcasts through a pay-for-viewing subscription model. Read more about the SBP here.

The second, newer initiative is the launch of the NFHS Network which has the potential to aggregate the state-by-state video broadcasts of high school athletic association tournament events across the US.  In total, this dwarfs the online football programming potential of the NFL or the online basketball programming potential of the NBA. And with many thousands of other events in dozens of other tournaments, there is more than enough content to populate a compelling digital network that is a safe and reliable platform for educational athletics. Read more about the NFHS Network here.

Neither of these initiatives is easy; if they were, they would have been attempted and accomplished years ago.  Each has some risks, as do most projects of real significance. The MHSAA is invested in making both successful for those who participate in and follow school sports in Michigan.

Nonfaculty Coaches

June 18, 2012

Since the so-called heyday of school sports in the 1950s, when you could count on more talk in a community about its few high school teams than about all the college and professional sports teams in the country combined, some things have improved – diversity and safety, for example; but some things have not met the high ideals hoped for in educational athletics.

During the explosive growth period of school sports in the 1970s and 1980s, when girls programs were introduced or reintroduced to schools and well-established community programs were added to the school sports curriculum, schools in almost every state had to backpedal from the ideal that only trained educators – certified teachers – could coach interscholastic athletic teams.  (In Michigan, except for two years in the mid 1950s when certified teachers were required, the rules only urge that coaches be certified teachers.)

While the number of sports and levels of teams have greatly expanded these past five or six decades, the coaching pool within the faculty of a school district has not.  Furthermore, teachers’ salaries improved so much that coaching stipends became less necessary to supplement teachers’ incomes, so teachers “volunteered” less readily to serve as coaches for a second and third sport.

Moreover, the coaching demands for one sport increased out of season, interfering with a person’s availability to help coach second and third sports during the school year.  This was commonplace in the sports that moved from the community into schools, but the out of season demands have increased significantly for traditional school sports as well.

There is irony that community youth sports programs not only have provided school districts with a pool of informed and interested people to serve as coaches, but they have also increased the demands on coaches so much out of season that coaches must specialize in a single sport and therefore are less available to assist with the many different sports and levels of teams that school districts struggle to provide students.

It is estimated now that more than half of all high school coaches do not work in the school building where they coach, which can create communications challenges for schools.  A smaller but growing number of high school coaches do not work at all in the field of education, which can create philosophical problems as well.  Not always, of course; in fact, many nonfaculty coaches are a rich and increasingly indispensible blessing for school sports.