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.
Outside View
October 4, 2011
Steve Jobs’ departure from Apple and then his death on Oct. 5 has caused just about every newspaper and business and technology magazine and online newsletter to provide its take on what Jobs meant to Apple, and to the world we live in.
Among the analyses I’ve read that could be most helpful to those in leadership of school sports is that of Cliff Kuang, before Jobs' death, in the October 2011 issue of Fast Company. In “What Steve Jobs Can Still Teach Us,” Kuang comments on Jobs’ “ability to see a company from the outside, rather than inside as a line manager.”
Over his career, observes Kuang, “He (Jobs) became less enamored of tech for tech’s sake. He blossomed into a user-experience savant.” He took the “outside view of a user.” Ultimately for Jobs, “usability was more important than capability.”
I suspect it would do us all well to take the same approach to school sports at the local and state levels; that is, to keep thinking about how the programs appear from the outside. How they appear to the end-user.
It’s all well and good that our rules are correct in their philosophy; but if they don’t make sense to end-users or don’t work in practical application, we may have problems. Same is true for our events, and for our technology.
It is impossible to expect complete understanding of all the policies and procedures of school sports or to avoid all controversy when the competing interests of partisans are involved as is the case in athletics. Remembering, therefore, that the task is not to please but to serve is a necessary mindset, because service in this work often means saying “No” or citing violations and requiring forfeits.
But even as we do these necessary but unpleasant things, which we know in advance will not be universally understood and supported, it is good to be mindful of how it all looks from the outside. It is most important that those in the necessary positions of doing these things be professional and consistent, with a steadfast commitment to apply policies and procedures uniformly. When people view the organization from the outside, even if they don’t fully understand or agree with a decision, they must see that each rule is applied identically to every school, without favoritism, and that rules are not just made up as we go along to relieve a pressure point or grease a squeaky wheel.