Iceland’s Eyjafjallajakul volcano permitting, my wife and I are off to Ireland soon.  The dark cloud threatening our long-ago-made travel plans provides an apt metaphor for many involved in interscholastic athletics.

For young people looking to school sports as the highlight and ending point of their experience in organized competitive athletics . . .

For athletic administrators whose jobs are being consolidated or eliminated . . .

For school superintendents, business officials and school board members who have cut budgets to the bone and beyond . . .

. . . this school year ends with dread that the next school year will be one of less opportunity and less oversight than we’ve seen at any time in the last 75 years of high school sports in Michigan.

I struggle for any words of comfort, except to say that it has been worse before – at least during the Great Depression and World War II – and we recovered.  In fact, in time, school sports got much grander in scale and greater in impact.

I recognize that hope is not a strategy for a recovery.  But few strategies succeed without it.  Optimism is the grease that keeps the wheels turning for any enterprise of any significance.

And I continue to believe we can maintain our core values in these desperate times, so that in better times we will rebuild on a solid foundation our school-based educational athletic program that is a unique American tradition somehow in touch with America’s soul and secrets of greatness.