Friday, December 14, 2007

Season switch an adjustment

It's a few weeks into the winter sports season and so far, so good. With the switch in seasons for girls' basketball, sharing the gym with the boys' hoops team doesn't appear to be an issue, at least with Chelsea and Dexter.

I can only imagine how difficult an adjustment it must be for a school like Pewamo-Westphalia. P-W is a small, farming-community high school just outside Lansing. It's a K-12 school with one tiny gymnasium. I covered P-W at one time during my career and it's small-school athletics at its finest, (think "Hoosiers" for basketball) but its gymnasium is the size of most suburban middle school gyms. When the season switch was announced, it was schools like P-W I thought of first. It's schools like the P-W's of the state who will be hit hardest by the seasonal switch. That's all water under the bridge, however, and the change has been made and everyone must deal with it.

As I've said before, and others throughout the state have mentioned, the switch might not be best for every school or every athlete, but the powers that be have decided and the good people of Michigan, including athletic directors, coaches and community members will make the switch work no matter what it takes. It doesn't mean the switch was totally right, but it means coaches and athletic directors throughout the state will work their tails off to make it as smooth and obstacle-free for the kids as possible. There are too many competent and caring individuals throughout the state involved in high school athletics not to make the switch work, no matter how unwelcomed or difficult it might be for smaller schools.