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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.

In Others’ Words

August 22, 2014

I’ve read and heard multiple times – so I’ve come to believe it’s at least partly true – that one of the techniques that marketing departments or agencies use when developing campaigns to promote a product or service is to look at it from the consumer’s, customer’s or client’s perspective.

The point is often brought home that if management would use this technique as much as marketers, then management would be more effective and would label itself, rather than marketers, as the “creative team.” It chafes me to hear a CEO say he or she wants to know what “creative” has to say about a sponsorship initiative before the CEO will offer an opinion.

Thinking about what our customers want doesn’t require that leaders suspend their personal beliefs or reverse experience-based opinions. It merely asks that we look at things from a different and sometimes even opposite point of view. And to be truly revealing, it asks that we try to put into words where other people stand on a particular topic.

It asks us to actually try to describe what our customers see from where they stand and what they say they want. For example, in our work, it would ask administrators to think about and actually describe what coaches want, and vice versa. And it asks both coaches and administrators to think about and put into their own words what student-athletes want, and what their parents want.

This has been an ongoing part of my life, provoked I suppose by my marriage of 42 years to a woman whose political views often point 180 degrees from my own. And this approach has been especially enlightening on school sports’ most troublesome topics, some of which we are tackling at this time, like ...

  • Out-of-season coaching rules
  • Junior high/middle school programming
  • Health and safety mandates