Over 24 years, I’ve observed communications change greatly:

• We hired the MHSAA’s first communications director in 1987.
• We saw the first fax machine delivered in 1988.
• Then we watched an IBM AS 400 mainframe computer be installed and take up an entire room of our old Trowbridge Road office building.  It was the single most expensive piece of equipment ever purchased by the MHSAA.
• And then we watched it become outdated within a few months as PC networks revolutionized the workforce.
• I saw my clunky car phone be replaced by a pocket-sized cell phone that has more power and memory than that AS 400.
• We’ve seen laptops replace desktops, and we now may be watching smart phones replace laptops.
• We’ve seen traditional mail be replaced by email, and we now may be watching texting, tweeting and Facebook replace email.
• We’ve seen websites replace newspapers, and bloggers replace columnists.
• We’ve seen cable TV challenge over-the-air TV, and we now may be watching Internet broadcasts replace them both and take a lot of radio’s turf as well.
• We created MHSAA.com and have redesigned it several times; and we’ve added MHSAA.tv that is populated with nearly 2,000 productions.
• We’ve seen online rules meetings replace face-to-face meetings, with coaches and officials fulfilling at their fingertips the rules meeting mandate that formerly required a commitment of many hours and miles.  The online meeting is a different experience, to be sure; but the miles not traveled by coaches and officials would equate to circling the earth at its equator multiple times every sports season!

We may prefer almost none of these new things over traditional ways of doing business, but we must deal with them all daily.  We must, that is, if we expect to have any relevance at all for high school participants and fans.