When the tools inherit the earth; or, when good things happen to bad people

As a member of the Syndicate for longer than SOS, I can attest that Mount Dismal was not original from him.

 

Well, McCabe as usual is defending Jack Roberts and the MHSAA, who embarked on a decade-plus-long and multi-million-dollar legal battle to defend a status quo any idiot could have told them 10 years ago they didn't have a chance in hell to prevail in.

Since the change has been made, many ADs have engaged in hissy-fit scheduling designed to maximally screw over everyone involved in the switch.

OH. And the whole thing from the beginning was driven by one overwhelming factor -- the schedule preferences of offseason club volleyball teams.

The mothers spearheading the lawsuit really barely gave a shit about the ramifications of the change on HS girls volleyball and basketball, they wanted their daughters freed to play high-level offseason club volleyball, which is where all the scholarship decisions are made. Most high-level college VB coaches pay little or no attention to high school volleyball.

More and more that's becoming the case in basketball, for both genders.

 

Which is more evidence that football is pretty much the only true high school sport left.

 

It should also be noted that the two daughters of the women who started the movement, were only able to get scholarships from Division II.

 

The MHSAA is the biggest fucking joke of an athletic association. Some of the most inane rules on the planet.

The season switches, the all-star game rules... ugh.

Don't even get me started on track. Last year, something like 75 percent of coaches voted to allow students to wear watches during competition. MHSAA said no.

The ultimate MHSAA boner move though, was in 2001, when they changed two cross country rules for no fucking reason.

It used to be that the top 3 teams in a region qualified for state meet, any team with 4 runners in the top 20 would also qualify. It's a difficult scenario to play out, all top 4 teams would have to be top heavy for a fourth team to qualify.

For some reason they changed the rule to say that for any team to additionally qualify they had to put 4 in the top 15. To this day I don't know how any team would place four kids in the top 15 of a race with like 150 people and not finish top-3.

Regardless, that year, my HS team finished with 4 in the top 20, and five in the top 21. We finished in third place. As we were about to walk up to the podium to get our medals and junk, we were told that we did not qualify because we had finished fourth place.

The MHSAA had also changed a rule, that stated if a team did not have 5 runners, all of their competing runners would not factor into the championship scoring. One team, with two runners, was therefore disqualified.

Since our team had all finished ahead of the two competing runners, our score did not change. But another team, which had placed 3 runners in the top 10, and a two runners in the high 20s, jumped two spots, shaved two points off their team score and jumped us. They qualified for states by one point.

Had either one of the rules been changed and not both, we would have made states.

The rules were changed back the next year. Thanks MHSAA. You fucks.

 

I went to CMU, and I had many pleasant mounts there. So there.

 

Unlike Starman, I think fighting the mothers for scholarships was the right thing to do.
Other than that, Jack Roberts is a joke. He's gone from middle of the road when he started to right-wing obstructionist. Michigan is the only state that won't allow its players to compete in national all-star games after their season is done, or lose eligibility in other sports. The National Federation holds a couple of basketball tournaments -- one boys and one girls, four teams in each; Roberts is against it because it puts a national spotlight ahead of the state level.
I know people in two states that hate going to meetings and dealing with him. He's starting to make his predecessor, Vern "No-Balls" Norris seem like Benjamin Disraeli...

 

Lost in the whining about the sports switch is this: Every other fucking state in the country was using the system. Every state which had been sued before Michigan had either lost or been told to give up by its lawyers. Their whole argument was: You can't make us. To which the court said, "Oh, yeah?"

Girls sports don't get as much attention because girls themselves don't support them outside of family. In our area, we had a team that had three Division I players, a couple D-II players and at least three D-III players that was a couple of missed free throws from going to the semifinals. We featured them to a fare-thee-well during the fall, and when this team had its senior night, in a non-league game, about 150 people showed up.

The boys team, which was bumping along at 8-12, drew five times that in the winter.

This is not to say there wasn't jackassery on both sides. There was. But the MHSAA spent millions of dollars of other people's money to fight a battle only it thought it could win.

And the seasons changed anyway.

 

Yeah, and just wait until NIKE, Adidas and UnderArmor launch the AAU Spring/Summer Football League. That'll be the end of that, too.

 

Injury risk is way too high.

 

But they can get COLLEGE SCHOLARSHIPS!!!

Plus, as the budget crunch gets tighter, you're going to see public high schools start to cut out football.


Essentially the NIKE and UnderArmor all-star games, and summer passing leagues, are the first steps in this direction.

 

Obviously the local newspapers weren't covering them enough.