MHSAA, AAU have never quite seen eye to eye

Jul 03, 2010

By: Oakland Press Sports

By KEITH DUNLAP
Of The Oakland Press
Back in 2006, there was obviously a lot of attention on the fact the biggest football game in the world, the Super Bowl, was being held at Ford Field in Detroit.
But people might not have known that as part of the Super Bowl festivities, the host city/area also got to be home to a youth football tournament involving high-school age kids around the world.
The NFL Global Junior Championship that year was held at the Pontiac Silverdome, with teams from Mexico, Japan, Canada, Germany and the United States competing in the event.
On a side note, the event ended in 2007 after 11 years and was replaced by the American Football Junior World Cup, a biannual event held in the summer.
When the NFL Global Junior Championship was held in a Super Bowl city, the U.S. team would be comprised of local high school players, but that wasn’t the case for the event at the Silverdome.
The U.S. instead was represented by a group of players who played in the Toledo, Ohio area, not metro Detroit.
So why was this the case?
Because of a longstanding, and often controversial, rule from the Michigan High School Athletic Association.
The MHSAA has a rule where high school athletes who compete for their schools in a sport can’t play in an event deemed as an all-star game or national championship (unless that player is a member of a national team), or else they must forfeit their athletic eligibility to play other sports the rest of the season.
That’s the reason why the high school football all-star game is played in the summer, some nine months after the season has ended.
Some are confused as to why the MHSAA has such a rule, claiming that it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience to have players compete in all-star games with other top players from around the country in their sport.
MHSAA communications director John Johnson said the rule is in place as a means to preserve the educational process of high school athletics and “avoid exploitation by parties who are not interested in the educational process.”
It’s not an issue for players who compete in just one high school sport and play in an all-star game in that particular sport, but does force multi-sport athletes who want to play in an all-star game to make a choice.
According to Johnson, it’s not true that Michigan is the only state with such a rule in place, adding that he knows of at least “a half dozen others” that have such a rule.
“It’s not one game, it’s a mindset,” Johnson said. “It’s something you start thinking weeks, months in advance. It affects the way you play in the games if you’re high school kids. It’s something that can also affect interaction with teammates. It becomes a breeding ground for a lot of different things, and they’re not necessarily healthy.”
There have been several athletes over the years within the state that have been forced to sacrifice playing other sports for the opportunity to play in a high-profile all-star game.
One local example recently was former Birmingham Detroit Country Day football standout Jonas Gray, who is now playing at Notre Dame.
A 2008 graduate, Gray was a three-sport athlete who was a role player on Country Day’s 2007 Class B state championship boys basketball team and was a key sprinter on Country Day’s track and field team that won the 2007 Division 3 state title.
As a senior, Gray had an opportunity to play in the U.S. Army All-American Bowl, an annual national high school all-star football game in San Antonio.
Gray happily took advantage of that opportunity, but it came at a price.
But because he played in that game, Gray was ineligible by the MHSAA to play basketball or run track during his senior year.
The MHSAA also doesn’t allow athletes to play high school sports and AAU sports at the same time, thus hockey players have to choose between playing high school and travel hockey in the winter.
Johnson said playing an AAU sport at the same time as a high school sport can hamper the educational process the organization wants high school athletics to promote.
“Again they can promote excessive behavior, excessive travel and excessive games,” Johnson said of the faults of AAU sports. “Now they’ve been coached by their non-school coach in a way that may be contrary to what that school’s coach is teaching that individual.”
Under the old sports seasons when volleyball was played in the winter, players would miss half of the AAU season, which began in January, because high school volleyball didn’t end until mid-March.
That was one reason why the lawsuit was brought against the MHSAA by two volleyball parents in the Grand Rapids area to switch the volleyball and girls basketball seasons, an effort which ultimately succeeded when the MHSAA lost a near 10-year court battle to keep the seasons the way they were.

E-mail Keith Dunlap at keith.dunlap@oakpress.com.

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