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Thinking Inside The Box

October 5, 2012

Praise is often heaped upon the innovative person who thinks “outside the box.”  But thinking “inside the box” is equally praiseworthy.

By this I mean doing the essentials better.  I mean remembering our first and fundamental reasons for being, and delivering the very finest services that support those purposes.

It is possible that by thinking outside the box, some organizations forget about their reasons for being; and in interscholastic athletics, we would be well served to think inside the box.

In sports we learn we must compete within the confines of end lines and sidelines.  Go beyond the boundary lines and you’re out of play, where you can’t score and can’t win.

If school sports will secure a victory for its future – meaning, school sports continue to be a tool for schools to reach and motivate young people in an educational setting – it will not occur from out of bounds.  It will occur because we stayed within prescribed boundaries:  local, amateur, educational, non-commercial, sportsmanlike and physically beneficial.

Story Power

January 12, 2015

I spend time every day surfing the MHSAA’s family of websites – MHSAA.com, Second Half and MHSAA.tv. My counterpart in another state was astounded that I do this, and incredulous that I could find the time to do this. But it makes perfect sense to me.

More people visit our websites on a typical day than visit our office in East Lansing during an entire year. We have more visitors to our websites during a typical month than attend all of our postseason tournaments combined during a typical year.

We have more opportunity to make first impressions through electronic entry than tournament turnstiles; and for the large majority of people who make contact with the MHSAA, electronic media may provide the only impression they will ever get of the MHSAA.

This is why we have styled the MHSAA’s websites in a manner that is visually pleasing and easy to navigate on both desktop and mobile devices. And this is why we have stuffed these websites not only with schedules, scores and stats but also with stories; and it’s why the stories are presented in text, audio, pictures and video streaming.

We know that those who share the stories of school sports most effectively will shape the message of school sports most persuasively.

Our job is not merely regulation of school sports, but communication about school sports – not merely event management, but content management – managing the message and meaning of school-sponsored sports.