Post-Event Celebrations
March 16, 2012
In my last posting I praised the high school participant as the best behaved athlete on any level of sport. It’s ironic: based on what we see on higher levels, the older the athlete becomes, the more immature he or she is allowed to behave.
But we do have at least one conduct problem; and it’s one with potential for much bigger problems. It’s post-event celebrations.
Post-event celebrations have led to property damage, and they will lead to personal injuries unless we give the problem more careful attention and supervision.
Post-event celebrations are largely outside of the published playing rules, and they are usually beyond the jurisdiction of contest officials.
So, they will end up being the responsibility of game administration, and injuries will become the liability of game administrators.
This spring, the Representative Council may adopt more policies and procedures to which the MHSAA will direct more attention. The initial focus, as proposed, is on MHSAA team tournaments and to hold participating schools more explicitly accountable for property damage caused by celebrating teams and spectators.
Hopefully, attention to the broader topic and tougher policies for this narrow slice of the problem will reverse what we see as an unhealthy trend in school sports – excessive post-event celebrations.
The Social Setting
March 18, 2014
Between these headlines was one of more significance: Facebook announced that it would be paying $19 billion to purchase WhatsApp. Which means social media is here to stay. And everybody, including big time basketball coaches, needs to deal with it in better ways than merely blasting it and/or barring it.
What it means for an organization like mine is that everything we do needs to be considered in all the usual goals, objectives and strategies progressions, and that at least one progression must have social media as an outcome and almost all progressions must have social media as a tactic.
Just over a decade ago we realized that almost every task we have has an information technology component. We discovered we needed our IT staff in the room when new projects or protocols were being considered, when new policies were being developed, and when all sorts of problems were being addressed. Fail to involve IT personnel soon enough or at all, we learned, and failure of the enterprise was assured.
We are at the same point today with social media. If we neglect the social media component – fail to consider how to use it to the advantage of the project or fail to consider how adverse social media could doom the project – we operate with at least one hand tied behind our back.
Just as the IT staff have needed to be consulted, and listened to, in order for the enterprise to reach its potential, so must our social media staff have a seat at the table and a voice in the discussion of anything of consequence we might think we should do.
This is as true for nonprofit organizations as it is for profit, for small organizations and large, both private and public.