Game Counts

There are many differences between High School sports and youth sports. One of them is that high school sports is an extension of the classroom. To that end, rules are set up by the various governing bodies to prevent one side or the other from exerting too much influence over the student. That's why all high school sports have competition limits for a season and for a given week.

Let's look at game limits for a minute. Let me work backwards
MSHL (MPSSAA Basketball) -- 22 games before the tournament
NCAA Divsion III - 25 games before the tournaments
NCAA Division I - 34 games before the tournaments
USA Junior - 40 - 54
USA Youth - unlimited to the extent of budgets.

The MPSSAA says that you can play 3 games in a week (Monday - Saturday) TWICE in a season and that an in-season tournament must happen when schools are not in session.

The MSHL has roughly a 10 week window to play league games and 2 more weeks of pre-season time. That means if a school wishes to play a full 22 game schedule, they have to play 1.8 games per week. Throw in a week of exams, and the number gets to 2 games / week, which fits nicely into the MPSSAA guidelines.

Why all the restrictions? We're trying to strike a balance between academics and extracurricular activities where one is not more important than the other, but each complements the other. "All work and no play make Johnny a dull boy." is the old adage. We want our students to have time for academics and sports, which is why we should not overload the extracurricular at the expense of the curricular (and vice versa).

A coach is a teacher and the practice is where his/her knowledge of the sport is conveyed to the players (students). The game is where he/she finds out how well his/her players absorbed the concepts taught in practice. Any coach can proctor an exam, I mean supervise a bench during a game, but the special ones are those who take raw talent and make it better by school's end.

So why my fuss about game counts? If you treat a game as an examination of what you have learned in practice, then you can see the concern. Imagine a teacher who scheduled 5 tests in 5 days (Monday - Friday). As a parent, would you say anything? You should. First, the teacher is not teaching. The students are learning the subject by examination and the teacher can get lazy. We pay our teachers to teach, not to proctor exams, though that is part of their duties.