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Travel Bug

November 2, 2012

International trips for U.S. youth sports teams is a big business.  Sometimes the target is school sports teams; and sometimes those schools and communities get foreign travel fever.

While I have nothing against international travel – in fact, it’s a hobby my wife and I enthusiastically share – I caution against international trips for teams or individual athletes.

Sometimes the competition is badly matched.  Sometimes our teams encounter and are routed by another country’s “national team.”  More often, our teams encounter poorly organized events and weak, thrown-together opposing teams and substandard venues.  But that’s not the major concern here.

Several years ago, a Michigan community spent $23,000 to help send 20 baseball players from three of its high schools to participate overseas.  That’s nice, but the school district didn’t have a junior high baseball program; and I wondered if the community fundraising might not have been used to provide new opportunities for more student-athletes.

About the same time, there was an effort to fund one basketball player from each of a league’s schools to compete in an international basketball tournament.  The cost was $2,200 for each student; and again I wondered if those communities might not have uses for the money that could provide benefit to more student-athletes.

Why do we spend thousands on a few when the same amounts of money could restore or expand opportunities for many?  Why do we focus on the fortunate few while the foundations of our programs rot through eliminated junior high programs and pay-for-play senior high programs?

No one can argue that some of these trips do some of our students some good.  But do they offer enough good for the few at a time when many students aren’t being offered even the basic opportunities of interscholastic athletics?

Local leadership should say “No” to requests to support expensive international trips.  There’s need for them to put more into the foundation of our programs and less into foreign travel.

No Easy Fix

February 13, 2015

“If we don’t fix this problem, even our friends and allies may turn against us.”

That was the dire warning one of the MHSAA staff members gave to the rest of us at a weekly staff meeting recently, during which this staff member was receiving emails from people appalled over the mid-season transfer of a basketball player from one school to another.

The “fix” that some people want is a rule that makes every transfer student ineligible for a full year, regardless of the reason for the change of schools or the circumstances of the student. Of course, that rule would never survive judicial scrutiny, and legislators in every corner of the state would be advocating change for the sake of one child or another.

A more moderate remedy is to utilize a rule that applies the full-year period of ineligibility to those students whose circumstances do not fit one of the already established 15 exceptions that make a student eligible without delay following a transfer. That half-measure would not stop many transfers that would still frustrate people, and it would snag many transfers that would continue to anger people.

The rules we already have in place are tools for schools to use to stop many of the transfers that frustrate without snaring those transfers that anger: the athletic-motivated transfer rule and especially the athletic-related transfer rule (or links law).

Before our friends and allies turn their backs on us, they need to turn in the transfer situations where the rules already apply, and the undue influence (recruiting) they can document. They need to give the system a chance to work to the full extent of its potential. We should not make tougher rules if schools fail to utilize the rules they already have.

Adopting rules is usually easy for the organization. Applying rules is often much harder for the schools.