Casting Lines for Future Tournaments
August 12, 2016
By Jack Roberts
MHSAA Executive Director
The MHSAA is best known to the public for the tournaments it conducts to conclude the fall, winter and spring seasons each school year.
These tournaments, the first and largest program of the MHSAA, have survived the Vietnam War, the Korean conflict and two World Wars. They have survived the technology bubble, the housing collapse, the energy crisis and the Great Depression.
MHSAA tournaments existed at the dawn of aviation and at the time of our nation’s lunar landing. Popes, presidents and governors have changed and changed again and again, and MHSAA tournaments roll on year after year.
But the sense of tradition and permanence and inevitability of MHSAA tournaments doesn’t dissuade us from asking questions about our tournaments, even some of the most basic questions. Here are two.
Question #1
I have long been and will always be an advocate for a Ryder Cup format for the MHSAA Golf Finals, and a team tennis approach to the MHSAA Tennis Finals; but 90 years of tradition is hard to overcome. Might this be a more exciting format? Could it be co-ed? Could it reverse the decline in boys tennis participation, and increase girls golf participation? Wouldn’t it be fun to try?
Periodically, the International Olympic Committee requires each of the designated Olympic sports to defend its status, to state its case why the sport should remain a part of the Olympic program. Then, after a series or votes that retain one sport at a time, the IOC drops the sport that makes the weakest case. It does so to make room for one of the previously unlisted sports that makes the best case for inclusion.
This would appear to keep the existing Olympic sports on their toes, and to keep the Olympic movement fresh and reflective of modern trends in sports.
While I would not enjoy the controversy, I can see the potential for some positive results if the MHSAA were to invoke the same policy for determining the 14 tournaments it will provide for girls and the 14 for boys.
This might cause us to consider more deeply what a high school sport should look like, or at least what an MHSAA tournament sport should stand for.
On the one hand, we might be inclined to drop tournaments for those sports that involve mostly non-faculty coaches and non-school venues, or require cooperative programs to generate enough participants to support a team, or resort almost entirely to non-school funding, or cater to individuals more than teams.
Or perhaps this process would cause policymakers to forget traditional thinking and ask: “In this day and age, should we shake off traditional notions of sport and consider more where modern kids are coming from?” That might mean fewer team sports and more individual sports, more “extreme” sports like snowboarding and skateboarding, and more lifetime sports, meaning not just golf and tennis and running sports, but also fishing and even shooting sports.
Currently, MHSAA policy states that the MHSAA will consider sponsorship of a tournament series for any sport which 64 member schools conduct on an interscholastic basis as a result of action by the governing boards of those schools.
Should the only question be how many schools sponsor a sport, or must an activity also have certain qualities and/or avoid certain “defects?” What should an MHSAA tournament sport look like and stand for?
Question #2
Bristling from criticism that his association is a money-grabbing exploiter of children, my counterpart in another state said, “If we were running our programs just to make money, we would do very many things very differently.” I knew exactly what he meant.
Because we care about the health and welfare of students, because we mean what we say that the athletic program needs to maximize the ways it enhances the school experience while minimizing academic conflicts, and because we try to model our claim that no sport is a minor sport when it comes to its potential to teach young people life lessons, we operate our programs in ways that make promoters, marketers and business entrepreneurs laugh, cry or cringe.
If money were the only object, we would seed and select sites to assure the teams that attracted the most spectators had the best chance to advance in our tournaments, regardless of the travel for any team or its fan base. If money were the only object, we would never schedule two tournaments to overlap and compete for public attention, much less tolerate three or four overlapping events. If money were the only object, we would allow signage like NASCAR events and promotions like minor league baseball games.
Those approaches to event sponsorship may not be all wrong; they’re just not all right for us. And we will live with the consequences of our belief system.
During a typical school year, more than 20 percent of the MHSAA’s 2,097 District, Regional and Final tournaments lose money. Not a single site in golf, skiing or tennis makes a single penny. In no sport did every District, Regional and Final site have revenue in excess of direct expenses.
In fact, in only three sports – boys and girls basketball and football – is revenue so much greater than direct expenses overall that it helps to pay for all the other tournaments in which the MHSAA invests.
That’s right: invests. When we present our budget to our board, we talk about the MHSAA’s investment in providing tournament opportunities in all those sports and all those places that cannot sustain the cost of those events on their own. How much is this investment worth to students, schools and society?
These two are core questions that require our focus far in advance of talk about scheduling, site selection, seeding and the myriad matters that too often hijack our time and attention.
Wolves Lacrosse Growing, Gaining While Providing Opportunities to Play
By
Paul Costanzo
Special for MHSAA.com
May 5, 2025
Eric Anderson has been sure to make the branding of his lacrosse program more representative of the make-up of his team.
The team is under the supervision of the Bay City Central athletic department, as BCC is the primary school in the cooperative that draws players from four schools total. But while the team also carries BCC’s mascot, the Wolves, their uniforms are black, purple and grey, and their helmets white – with those color choices making “Wolves lacrosse” more a representation of the breakdown of its players: 12 from Bay City Central, 12 from Frankenmuth, two from Freeland and two from Saginaw Swan Valley.
While the players outside of Bay City Central appreciate the gesture, they’re much more appreciative of the opportunity.
“Lacrosse being my favorite sport, I didn’t really have a choice. If there wasn’t a team, I couldn’t play,” Frankenmuth senior Aidan Hubbard said. “With this opportunity, it brings a lot of joy to me, playing the sport I love, and I didn’t have to just quit it because there wasn’t a team.
“I’m going to be honest, (the branding is) not really (important). As long as I’m playing, I don’t care what our team name is. We’re wearing the purple and playing on this field.”
The identity is important to Anderson, who built the team by going the co-op route following the pandemic. His first season as coach was set to be the spring of 2020, but a promising roster of more than 30 players never got to see the field.
By the time he was able to coach a game in 2021, that number was down to 14.
“I reached out to my AD and said that we have to do something different; we need a co-op,” Anderson said. “My son was coming in as a freshman, and I knew we had a couple lacrosse players who are hockey players at Frankenmuth High School. We reached out to Frankenmuth, and Frankenmuth grabbed a hold right away. … Between the parents and myself, we have not had a single issue. Everything has been absolutely seamless. We treat it as one. This is a Bay City Central lacrosse team. Bay City Central pays for it. But our colors are black, purple and grey, even though Central is purple and gold. We refer to it as Wolves lacrosse.”
Anderson’s son, Maveric, attends Bay City Central, and was part of that first co-op team, as were Hubbard and John Britton, who both attend Frankenmuth.
All three are now seniors, along with Frankenmuth’s Caleb Morgan, who joined as a sophomore and is in his third year with the program.
“It’s very unique,” Morgan said. “Because it’s not people you see every day in school. You only get to see these guys this time during the year, so it’s like a very unique experience catching up after the year is over and everybody comes back after a whole year of not seeing each other.”
With that backbone, the team has grown to its current number of 28, nearly to the point where Anderson can create a junior varsity squad.
“The program really wasn’t too much in the past years,” Hubbard said. “Now, it’s kind of like getting a little jumpstart. Even kids over in Frankenmuth, everyone in Frankenmuth is talking about it. It’s kind of hot in Frankenmuth right now. Lots of younger kids are wanting to play.”
It helps that the Wolves are translating those numbers into success.
Heading into tonight, the Wolves are 8-4 on the season and have won eight of their past 10 games.
Not only have they already set a school record for wins, they’re on their way to doubling the number of wins they had (five) over the previous three years combined.
“We have a bunch of younger kid stepping into roles that they’ve never really played before,” Britton said. “I kind of figured that sooner or later we’d get enough kids to put on a lacrosse field and win some games.”
It’s something Anderson could see coming, as the team had been getting more and more competitive. And, despite the fact they were consistently scheduled as a team’s ceremonial Senior Night, they weren’t making it easy for the opposition.
“This group of guys would compete in every single game,” Anderson said. “We would just lose because, in the fourth quarter, we’d run out of gas. We didn’t have enough players. We’ve been everybody’s Senior Night for the last number of years. Last year, we watched all these teams graduating 18 kids, 16 kids, all these kids, and we graduated one. You believe that these kids, they’ve kept receipts.”
Now, Anderson is seeing his senior-led team – there are 13 on the Wolves roster – not only winning more games, but controlling them.
“You know where I see (the improvement), I see it offensively, where we’re finally able to handle the ball, make passes, and control the ball in the offensive zone,” Anderson said. “We’re not always having to be on the run and backtracking. We’re able to get the ball in the zone, maintain an offensive possession and get a quality shot.”
The Wolves already have attained the goals Anderson had set for his team, as they’re competing night in and night out and have shown massive improvement year over year.
For the players, they simply want to keep doing that – and building up the program for which they’ve laid the foundation.
“We’ve kind of just been building,” Hubbard said. “We’ve had our little group, and it’s just been building up and everyone here has stuck it through, so I think we all deserve it. Coaches, too. They stuck it through while we were one of the worst, if not the worst, lacrosse teams in Michigan.”
Paul Costanzo served as a sportswriter at The Port Huron Times Herald from 2006-15, including three years as lead sportswriter, and prior to that as sports editor at the Hillsdale Daily News from 2005-06. He can be reached at [email protected] with story ideas for Genesee, Lapeer, St. Clair, Sanilac, Huron, Tuscola, Saginaw, Bay, Arenac, Midland and Gladwin counties.
PHOTOS (Top) Wolves lacrosse players celebrate a win this season. (Middle) Maveric Anderson (8) pursues a loose ball Saturday against East Kentwood. (Photos by Shae Lauwers/Moments by Shea.)