Published: Feb. 15, 2014
How to create success
Tradition. That’s a word that gets tossed around a lot in the world. Sports is no different. Tradition. How is tradition developed?
Well, it’s quite simple. For the sake of this argument, we’ll consider how tradition is developed in sports. In sports, tradition is developed through repeated success. Take West Bend West’s baseball program as an example. The Spartans have a tradition — repeated success — of good baseball teams, often playing for conference and state championships.
How is this created? Commitment and dedication.
People, especially athletes, want to be a part of good things. Who do you know wants to walk into a negative situation? Not many.
Thus, continuing to allow open enrollment is a hinderance on a community’s ability to create a tradition.
Washington County is a victim of the open enrollment rule in Wisconsin simply because of how close so many communities are to each other. Open enrollment allows students to pick which high school he or she wants to attend, disregarding their geographic location. With communities like Hartford, West Bend, Slinger and Kewaskum close to each other, it is quite possible for students to head to certain schools for its athletics, rather than staying “close to home.”
Too often we are seeing kids who live in Slinger attend Hartford Union High School. Or a student from West Bend go to Slinger.
Why? Academics? Maybe. It’s hard to believe. What open enrollment also allows schools to do is recruit. While it is against WIAA rules to recruit, it is almost impossible to prove it’s taking place.
All a student has to say something along the lines of “I live in Slinger, but I want to go to West Bend because it has better academic options.” Can we prove that student is lying or telling the truth? No.
Where is the tradition?
Eliminate open enrollment and you eliminate recruiting.
A lot of schools who have asked to move from one conference to another is mostly citing lack of being able to be competitive as a reason. Communities are losing student- athletes to other communities because of a lack of competitiveness so they want to go elsewhere. That’s when recruiting takes place.
A while back, I had a conversation with Kewaskum baseball coach Doug Gonring about some of the issues underlining the West Bend athletics program as it tries to resurrect its football teams. One point he brought up was an excellent one.
He said the students of West Bend should go to the school their parents went to and not the first sibling choose the school for the rest of his or her siblings.
Think about this: a parent or parents who went to West may find themselves rooting for their son and or daughter who go to East or vice versa, maybe because the volleyball team is better at School A than at school B. That creates split support for the parents. Who should they root for? East or West?
Those two changes can and will go a long way to establishing a proud tradition.
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