Century of School Sports: MHSAA Blazes Trail Into Cyberspace
By
Geoff Kimmerly
MHSAA.com senior editor
January 9, 2025
When the MHSAA took its first footsteps into cyberspace in 1996 – and then officially launched MHSAA.com on Aug. 15, 1997 – the jump into the internet revolution was to help characterize the MHSAA’s focus on the future, according to a Muskegon Chronicle report quoting then-executive director Jack Roberts.
Predicting how that future would quickly and continuously unfold may have been anyone’s guess. But over the next nearly three decades, MHSAA.com has grown, evolved, added a companion website and then united them into a single valuable landing spot not just for those who work to make our games happen, but the millions who cheer for them as well.
The first rendition of an MHSAA website reached the World Wide Web during Fall 1996 with an American Online (aol.com) URL and included rankings for the MHSAA Football Playoffs. The official version 1.0 of MHSAA.com launched just about a year later, anchored by what would be the website’s priorities for the next 15 years – an area titled “Administration” containing tools primarily for school administrators, a “Services” section highlighting sportsmanship, scholarship and safety; and “The Games” that included sport-by-sport details on rules changes, tournament assignments and historical information.
The MHSAA reported more than 12,000 visitors to its online home during October 1997 – about 400 daily, with the weekly football rankings the largest draw. A little more than a year later, in November 1998, the MHSAA enjoyed its biggest month to date with more than 2,500 visitors daily to climb past 850,000 since the launch of the website. More than 58,000 of those views came during the release of that season’s Football Playoff pairings, and another major draw was the “Games Wanted” page listing teams looking for opponents, which was athletic directors’ biggest ask when surveyed two years earlier on what they wanted most from an MHSAA website.
MHSAA.com already was pushing far ahead of the curve, especially when it came to state school sports associations. But that start was only slightly a sign of things to come. The website has taken on a life that far surpasses any “much has changed, much has stayed the same” scenario.
Truth be told, the goals for the website have not changed in several years – MHSAA.com has provided a place for member school administrators and coaches, and game officials, to do their daily MHSAA-related business. But that mission has been joined by a growing emphasis on telling the story of school sports to the growing number of fans paying us a visit.
What’s changed is how the MHSAA has delivered on those missions.
The website’s design evolved during the final years of the 1990s and first decade of the 2000s, following the fast-moving progression across the internet. Navigation – getting users where they want to go easily – became the buzzword, and adding more and more information to the site meant adding better avenues to find and organize it.
The MHSAA redesign carried out during the 2009-10 school year – the first built by now-longtime partner Gravity Works Design & Development in Lansing – propelled the website in a big way toward what you see today. Navigation menus now remained a static part of every page as users navigated within the site. A large action photo was placed at the top of the front page to bring it to life, as were feeds from the MHSAA’s well-followed social media accounts and a video player highlighting the growing broadcast and video presence.
And then came the largest leap. In late 2011, the MHSAA became one of two state associations nationwide at the time (along with Arizona) to begin creating its own fan-focused editorial content. In January 2012, the MHSAA launched its Second Half website as a home for feature stories, blogs, videos and coverage of MHSAA Finals, produced mostly by longtime media members operating as correspondents from their various regions of the state.
For the 2008-09 school year, MHSAA.com had attracted 19.2 million page views. For 2013-14, the count (including both the main and Second Half sites) totaled 22.5 million. That jumped to 27.2 million for 2018-19. And the most defining design change was still ahead.
While the Second Half’s article content had begun to draw nearly 1 million page views annually – a success considering the state has about 170,000 high school athletes – that content remained separated from an already-robust amount of schedules, scores, results and records data the MHSAA had published on its main site over 25 years, plus all the other postseason promotion and information fans had begun to seek.
So in 2022, the MHSAA made one more big jump to land at the website you’re visiting today.
Paying special attention to not disrupt the work of school people using the site for administrative purposes, the MHSAA closed down Second Half and brought all that content to the front of MHSAA.com – for the first time making the front page of the main website fan-focused. That emphasis on spectator experience continued with new, easier-to-understand navigation, and redesigns of sports pages to better promote MHSAA Tournament events and Michigan Power Ratings (MPR), ticket ordering and record book information fans seek. All of the tools school sports people relied on in the past remain, just flip-flopped with the stories and stats that tell our story to a growing audience.
This new version also is geared differently to better serve an audience that has moved significantly toward viewing on phones. Roughly 70 percent of MHSAA.com page views are coming on mobile devices, and this latest design was built to be responsive and best-serve that visitor preference.
The response to the most recent redesign indeed tells the rest of the story – 38.2 million page views during 2023-24, a 40-percent jump from five years earlier. The largest-drawing single day of the school year was March 1, 2024, with nearly 444,000 views as that year’s Winter tournaments began their final month. Team schedule pages in 2023-24 drew 13 million views, with 2.1 million views of tournament brackets and 1.7 million of the statewide scores page. The site’s editorial content – all of those features, game stories and more – were up to 1.65 million views.
MHSAA.com remains what it’s always been, but now it’s so much more – and no doubt, the best is yet to come.
Previous "Century of School Sports" Spotlights
Dec. 31: State's Storytellers Share Winter Memories - Read
Dec. 17: MHSAA Over Time - Read
Dec. 10: On This Day, December 13, We Will Celebrate - Read
Dec. 3: MHSAA Work Guided by Representative Council - Read
Nov. 26: Finals Provide Future Pros Early Ford Field Glory - Read
Nov. 19: Connection at Heart of Coaches Advancement Program - Read
Nov. 12: Good Sports are Winners Then, Now & Always - Read
Nov. 5: MHSAA's Home Sweet Home - Read
Oct. 29: MHSAA Summits Draw Thousands to Promote Sportsmanship - Read
Oct. 23: Cross Country Finals Among MHSAA's Longest Running - Read
Oct. 15: State's Storytellers Share Fall Memories - Read
Oct. 8: Guided by 4 S's of Educational Athletics - Read
Oct. 1: Michigan Sends 10 to National Hall of Fame - Read
Sept. 25: MHSAA Record Books Filled with 1000s of Achievements - Read
Sept. 18: Why Does the MHSAA Have These Rules? - Read
Sept. 10: Special Medals, Patches to Commemorate Special Year - Read
Sept. 4: Fall to Finish with 50th Football Championships - Read
Aug. 28: Let the Celebration Begin - Read
PHOTOS (Top) Clockwise from top left are images of the front page of MHSAA.com from the years 1998, 2005, this week and 2014. (Middle) This is the front page of the MHSAA's Second Half site from June, 16, 2017.
Involvement vs. Meaningful Involvement
November 27, 2012
By Jed Blanton
MSU Institute for the Study of Youth Sports
As I've worked with the MHSAA in student leadership development and through my role in performance consulting and mental training, a number of coaches and athletes have asked me how to “get kids to buy in” or see the vision of their coach/captain, etc.
Particularly in high school sports, rosters consist of players with reasons for participating in their sport that range from pure enjoyment and social life, all the way to kids with aspirations and ability to play in the highest level of college athletics.
Having a range of talent, and then a range of desire and commitment can be a difficult load to balance as a coach.
Based on the questions I've been posed over the years, it seems that the magic answer lies somewhere in this notion of “buy-in” and if, just if, the coach could trigger that “buy-in” everything would work out. A winning season or at least a more successful season would be a certainty, and all the athletes would be emotionally involved, or more so, emotionally invested, as well as completely and fully physically and mentally committed to THE GAME.
This almost sounds like the ideal ending of a Disney sports movie … but that doesn't mean it isn't a possibility, and we can find some ways to make your reality closer to this vision.
The trick is … there is no trick; there is no magic formula. The ability to create “buy-in” means giving up something that might make a coach shudder and cringe just a bit. My challenge to coaches is this: Give up control. SHARE some of the duties and tasks you feel are your job, with … your players.
DON’T hit the back button or close your browser just yet. Let me explain.
The first thing to understand here is how people learn. If we want our athletes to “buy in,” we may have to teach “buy-in” first, which involves understanding how people learn behaviors and adopt a mentality, as the state of “buy-in” would be considered.
Psychologically, we know that people can learn merely from watching and modeling others. But in the short-term, this tends to include only behaviors, not the more abstract notions of passion or commitment which is seemingly what coaches desire more of in their players when we talk about “buy-in.”
However, it is important. So the first thing a coach needs to do is behave in such ways that indicate they are “bought in,” more so than just telling kids to be more committed. Have you ever stopped to think about what it looks like when someone has “bought in” to an athletic team’s vision? Do you have a team vision statement to guide behaviors and goals?
The next step in how people learn new behaviors upon watching others is having those behaviors they are attempting to mimic reinforced. Encouraging players and showing gratitude to those who demonstrate the desired mentality will help foster the expectations you have for your players. I must point out here that punishing or dismissing players and behaviors that stray from this desired state won’t help the learning process.
Next, and here is where the challenge lies, is sacrificing some control and sharing some responsibilities with your players. This entails involving them in the process of the sport. So often our high school athletes experience sport very passively. They are told what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. Then critiqued, sometimes put down and constantly judged on their abilities to do very little else than act in the ways they are told to act.
There is no option for personal investment here. Trust is the guiding factor. And while trust is extremely important, it’s not what may ultimately create “buy-in.”
Involvement fosters ownership. Meaningful involvement requires an emotional investment because the amount of responsibility increases. So what does being meaningfully involved look like? Being meaningfully involved in the sport as an athlete would mean being able to make decisions that are then actually carried out before they are critiqued. If you ask a player what they think about any given decision, then tell them what you think (which is also what they’ll do), you are merely seeking input rather than allowing them to be involved. What would it look like if the captain or senior players were able to set the starting line-up or batting order? Or what if the athletes were in charge of running a two-hour practice once a week? How about letting one or two of the athletes decide what play is going to be run in the final minutes of a close game? I mentioned the word “trust” earlier, and the key in these examples is coaches are showing athletes “trust.” This just might be what fosters the all important “buy-in.”
The hardest part on the coaches’ end is letting the decision play out, and then talking about why it may have failed. Discussing it rationally, debriefing the decision, and allowing them to process where the mistake was made without placing blame on them is where athletes can really learn about their sport, their role on the team, and how to make tough decisions while sharing in the full experience of the competition and preparation.
There is always a chance they’ll make the same decision you would make as the coach. After all, they have been practicing in your system. This is a great way to assess if you are having an impact and if your athletes are learning rather than just passively participating.
As a former athlete, I can honestly say I never truly understood my sport (distance running) until I was asked to serve as a race director or create training programs for younger athletes and people interested in taking their running to a more competitive level. I’m sure for most first-time coaches, the number of decisions you have to make humbles your former-athlete self rather quickly.
Watching the student leadership program participants I work with struggle with projects and presentations they are asked to design is tough, and I want nothing more than to help them and make sure that it’s “right.” But I can also say that in those times when I've been able to see the end result in those instances when they made the decisions, they created something on their own, they are happier, more knowledgeable, and certainly “bought in,” as they have control for the first time.
Blanton is a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University in the department of Kinesiology, specializing in the PsychoSocial Aspects of Sport and Physical Activity, and a research assistant for MSU's Institute for the Study of Youth Sports. He has served as a facilitator at MHSAA Captains Clinics the last three years and currently is assisting the association with its student leadership programs.