Teaming Up

February 21, 2012

Try as I might, and no matter how much I practiced, I never became comfortable going to my left as a high school basketball player. I feel the same way about some of this job I have today.

If I’m asked a question about student eligibility, my response is usually quick and confident. The topic is in my wheelhouse, my comfort zone, my right hand.

But when I need to make a decision about information technology, a subject that didn’t exist when I started in this work, I need much more time and I’m more tentative with my answers. And it feels like I’m dribbling with my left hand.

Unfortunately, as time goes by, I’m faced with more questions that are in my area of weakness than my area of strength. It’s just the way the world works today, with everything tied into or revolving around technology.

Fortunately, we’ve assembled a team at the MHSAA office that includes staff for whom technology is not a thing. It just is. Like the air they breathe. They are as instinctive with their advice about technology as I am about the transfer rule.

Gratefully, there’s room for both of us in a modern enterprise serving traditional values.

Valuable Volunteers

July 18, 2017

One of the most encouraging aspects of the job I have enjoyed for more than 30 years is what I see on display whenever I attend regular-season contests and Michigan High School Athletic Association tournaments. It's the many volunteers who make the events run smoothly.

From parking lot supervisors, to ticket sellers and ticket takers, to concession stand cooks and servers, to program sellers, to the dozens of people needed to time and measure and otherwise administer large meets in individual sports ... volunteers are the blood pulsing through the veins of school-sponsored sports events.

They work in numbers that amaze me; they work with consistency and longevity that humbles me. They show up years after their own children were participants. I can attend the same event several years in a row and see most of the same volunteers serving year after year. Serving with enthusiasm and with joy, and with no more compensation than a T-shirt, sandwich and soft drinks.

Appropriately, our trophies and medals go to the top-performing student-athletes. But my gratitude goes to these many behind-the-scenes adults.

Thanks for another great year.