This is election season, and we’ll hear political commentators talk a lot about the need for candidates to “stay on message.”  That’s probably good advice for those of us involved in school sports.

• To stay on message of what educational athletics can do to improve students, schools and communities.
• To stay on message about the bargain that the interscholastic athletic program provides by engaging so many participants at so little cost.
• To stay on message about a program that pursues high participation and high standards – standards that promote scholarship, sportsmanship and safety and maintain a scope or perspective that is consistent with the educational mission of schools.

In the 1994 book Complete and Utter Failure, author Neil Steinberg writes:  “Companies that forget what made them great go under.”  He reports that far more corporate failures arise from forgetting or forsaking their roots than missing an opportunity to expand.

How we do things these days, and how we communicate about them, may be greatly changing; but what we do and the basic messages we communicate should not.  Even as changes swirl around us, we must remember our roots and stay on message in what we say and do.