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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.

Designed and Delivered

March 8, 2016

The benefits of school sports do not occur by accident. They occur by design and by delivery.

It is the design of policies and procedures to keep the program student-focused, school-centered, sensible in scope, safe, sane and sportsmanlike. All core values of educational athletics.

The value is also enhanced by the delivery system – the quality of coaching and expertise of administration.

  • Just as the teacher is the key to learning in the academic classroom, the coach is the key to learning on the athletic team. This is why the MHSAA has designed and delivers a face-to-face, multi-level coaching education program anytime, anywhere in Michigan.

  • The other key of the delivery system is the local school athletic administrator with a skill set that meets the complex demands of a program that operates in an arena of high emotion and risk of injury. This is why Michigan often leads the nation in the number of high school athletic directors who have completed the highest level of training and certification of the National Interscholastic Athletics Administrators Association, and why the Michigan Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association and the MHSAA devote so much time and attention to initial and ongoing athletic director training.