A Backhanded Compliment
April 17, 2012
A year ago this month I listened to the attorney for another statewide high school athletic association pose this question: “Why is it that people quite readily accept inflexible age limitations over a broad spectrum of American life, including sports, but presuppose it is wrong for school sports?”
This attorney was in the middle of a controversy that more recently has visited the MHSAA: an overage student seeking relief from a universally applied maximum age rule. The speaker was perplexed and frustrated by the double standard.
Part of the reason for the double standard rests in the reality that people value the school sports experience so much more than other parts of life, including other sports experiences. Because they want the opportunity to play, they resort to litigation in an attempt to create the right to play.
Another part of the reason school sports is challenged on an issue on which other programs get a free pass is that school sports has a centralized authority, close to home. State high school associations are readily accessible targets, easier both to find and to fight with than most other entities with age restrictions.
And, of course, part of the reason for the double standard is the proximity of interscholastic athletics to academics – the former extracurricular, the latter curricular – the former a privilege for most teenagers, the latter a right of all citizens to age 26.
The reasons school sports are attacked on this issue while other entities are not are reasons really complimentary to school sports: the program is popular, accessible and connected to education. None of these features of school sports, or its age limitation, should change.
Beyond Fairness
April 11, 2017
One of the lessons I learned decades ago when I was employed at the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) is that sometimes the playing rules are not fair.
The NFHS is the publisher of playing rules for most high school sports, and its rule books govern competition for most of the contests for most of the high schools in the U.S.
But the NFHS doesn’t publish the most fair rules. On purpose.
The rules for the high school level attempt to do much more than promote competitive equity, or a balance between offense and defense; they also attempt – without compromising participant health and safety – to simplify the administration of the game.
Unlike Major League Baseball, where umpires officiate full-time, and professional basketball, football and ice hockey where they officiate nearly full-time, the officials at the high school level are part-timers. They have other jobs. This is their avocation, not their vocation.
So the NFHS develops and publishes rules that minimize exceptions to the rules. In football, for example, there are fewer variables for determining the spot where penalties are enforced.
At the high school level, the rule makers intend that the rules be – for players, coaches and officials alike – quicker to learn, simpler to remember, and easier to apply during the heat of contests.