BASKETBALL: Midland Daily News Article Highlights Reasons For Basketball Switch

Fred Kelly, a writer for the Midland Daily News, went into depth to explain the previously rumored reasons for the switch of start times for men's and women's Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference basketball games.

As I (and many others I'm sure) struggle to find many people who would be in favor of such a change, regardless of some of the reasons, the MDN article explains things. Speculation has been pretty consistent that the GLIAC would not have made such a change on its own, this newspaper article works to clear up some of the mystery behind this major scheduling adjustment.

Here is an excerpt from the Midland Daily News article:

Fans of GLIAC basketball -- not to mention players and coaches -- will have to adjust their schedules when the 2010-11 season gets underway.

The GLIAC, in response to a complaint filed by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR), has flip-flopped the start times for its women's and men's basketball games for the upcoming season.

That means that the men, who have traditionally played shortly after the women's game, will play first, with the women's games to follow.

The basketball schedule will revert back to women-first and men-second for the 2011-12 season, then continue rotating back-and-forth annually.

Jeff Ligney, assistant commissioner for media relations for the GLIAC -- which includes Northwood and Saginaw Valley State universities -- said the move was made at the request of the OCR.

"They (the OCR) asked us to do something. They didn't force us (to make the switch)," Ligney noted. "They just told us that a complaint was filed against us and that some people felt we were not treating women's basketball the same as the men by having them play first all of the time.

The rest of the article goes into more detail and includes comments from basketball coaches at Saginaw Valley State University and Northwood University. None of the comments from any of the coaches could be characterized as a ringing endorsement of the new scheduling format the GLIAC plans to adopt.

I realize we live in a politically correct world these days, but I would certainly question the wisdom of this move.

Time will tell, but hopefully time will not confirm what seems obvious: that this change will create more problems than it will solve.