Bowman Suspension Should Be Last Straw
January 17, 2017 at 4:47 p.m.
By Roger Grossman-
Commissioner Bobby Cox and a group of his associates showed up at Bowman Academy on Jan. 9 armed with a stunning two-year ban from IHSAA tournaments for teams competing in all sports for what he called “a lack of institutional control over its athletic programs.”
Two years is a long time! You just don’t hear about that kind of penalty at the high school level anywhere in the country.
It seems harsh, until you hear what they did.
The laundry list of sins centers on the boys basketball program (Triton fans … surprised? Didn’t think so). Bowman has been found guilty of:
• Playing a basketball player in a varsity game who was not a student at the school.
• Playing a player whose eligibility had expired (you have 8 semesters of eligibility in high school).
• Playing a player who did not file transfer papers with the IHSAA (required by the IHSAA to be considered for eligibility at your new school).
• Playing a player who had falsified his transfer papers from another school to Bowman.
• Playing a player who was not participating in enough classes at Bowman to be eligible.
• Playing a player in more than five combined junior varsity and varsity quarters in a single night (five is the max).
• Fielding teams with coaches who had not taken the prescribed educational courses required for safety purposes (which is why the ban is for all teams. Only two coaches in the whole school met this requirement).
• Playing a game in which they did not sign a contract with the opposing school.
• Playing too many games in a season.
OK, so you read that … now take a minute and go back and read the list again and soak it in.
Having a hard time wrapping your mind around it? I don’t blame you … let me help.
The boys basketball team and its coaches have so blatantly cheated that the state’s sports sanctioning body gave them just about the harshest penalty possible shy of disenfranchising Bowman’s IHSAA membership permanently (which could easily have happened).
They boldly played a player that didn’t even attend their school! Seriously! How crazy is that?
The last two on my list above are connected. They played a team from Ohio and never signed a contract for the game. What’s the big deal? That game was their 23rd game of the season, which is one more than the IHSAA allows without their special approval. No contract, no paper trail … it never happened, right?
Wrong.
So you are asking the obvious question: “Where on earth is the athletic director?”
Uh, well, funny thing is the athletic director is also the boys basketball coach.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Bowman Academy is a charter school in Gary established by Ball State University. Its stated purpose, according to its own website, is “Thea Bowman Leadership Academy shall become a world-class model for high performance urban schools preparing all students for academic success and leadership roles in a global society.”
EPIC FAIL!
Its official title is Thea Bowman Leadership Academy. It professes to be training the leaders of our future.
EPIC FAIL!
Thea Bowman was a Roman Catholic evangelist who died in 1990 after a long life of serving and educating in the African-American community. If I was her family members, I’d be talking to someone about pulling my family’s name off the marquee.
But none of this is any big surprise to us here. None of it. Triton fans know all too well about Bowman Academy. They used to tangle with them in the Class 1A boys basketball tournaments and it was always a boiling caldron of emotions. Triton fans had heard the whispers of impropriety, and they weren’t having any of what Bowman was selling.
The IHSAA had dealt with Bowman Academy twice before.
This time there was no place to hide.
Unlike past events that have occurred in the northwest part of the state, there are no claims of unfair treatment. No one is screaming about racism against a Gary-based school or “Region Bias.” No one is threatening to take it to court – at least not yet anyway.
The school says they discovered the problems, self-reported them and they are working to fix them.
In the meantime, they will be sitting out state tournaments in all sports for the next two years.
Let the word be spread to all of these little private schools popping up all over Indiana. You, who mysteriously have been in business for only a few years and have 70 students, but have compiled a roster of 12 basketball players who rank in the top 5 in 1A and make deep tournament runs, you are on alert. Your free run is over.
No more free passes.
Sportsmanship demands it.
Commissioner Bobby Cox and a group of his associates showed up at Bowman Academy on Jan. 9 armed with a stunning two-year ban from IHSAA tournaments for teams competing in all sports for what he called “a lack of institutional control over its athletic programs.”
Two years is a long time! You just don’t hear about that kind of penalty at the high school level anywhere in the country.
It seems harsh, until you hear what they did.
The laundry list of sins centers on the boys basketball program (Triton fans … surprised? Didn’t think so). Bowman has been found guilty of:
• Playing a basketball player in a varsity game who was not a student at the school.
• Playing a player whose eligibility had expired (you have 8 semesters of eligibility in high school).
• Playing a player who did not file transfer papers with the IHSAA (required by the IHSAA to be considered for eligibility at your new school).
• Playing a player who had falsified his transfer papers from another school to Bowman.
• Playing a player who was not participating in enough classes at Bowman to be eligible.
• Playing a player in more than five combined junior varsity and varsity quarters in a single night (five is the max).
• Fielding teams with coaches who had not taken the prescribed educational courses required for safety purposes (which is why the ban is for all teams. Only two coaches in the whole school met this requirement).
• Playing a game in which they did not sign a contract with the opposing school.
• Playing too many games in a season.
OK, so you read that … now take a minute and go back and read the list again and soak it in.
Having a hard time wrapping your mind around it? I don’t blame you … let me help.
The boys basketball team and its coaches have so blatantly cheated that the state’s sports sanctioning body gave them just about the harshest penalty possible shy of disenfranchising Bowman’s IHSAA membership permanently (which could easily have happened).
They boldly played a player that didn’t even attend their school! Seriously! How crazy is that?
The last two on my list above are connected. They played a team from Ohio and never signed a contract for the game. What’s the big deal? That game was their 23rd game of the season, which is one more than the IHSAA allows without their special approval. No contract, no paper trail … it never happened, right?
Wrong.
So you are asking the obvious question: “Where on earth is the athletic director?”
Uh, well, funny thing is the athletic director is also the boys basketball coach.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Bowman Academy is a charter school in Gary established by Ball State University. Its stated purpose, according to its own website, is “Thea Bowman Leadership Academy shall become a world-class model for high performance urban schools preparing all students for academic success and leadership roles in a global society.”
EPIC FAIL!
Its official title is Thea Bowman Leadership Academy. It professes to be training the leaders of our future.
EPIC FAIL!
Thea Bowman was a Roman Catholic evangelist who died in 1990 after a long life of serving and educating in the African-American community. If I was her family members, I’d be talking to someone about pulling my family’s name off the marquee.
But none of this is any big surprise to us here. None of it. Triton fans know all too well about Bowman Academy. They used to tangle with them in the Class 1A boys basketball tournaments and it was always a boiling caldron of emotions. Triton fans had heard the whispers of impropriety, and they weren’t having any of what Bowman was selling.
The IHSAA had dealt with Bowman Academy twice before.
This time there was no place to hide.
Unlike past events that have occurred in the northwest part of the state, there are no claims of unfair treatment. No one is screaming about racism against a Gary-based school or “Region Bias.” No one is threatening to take it to court – at least not yet anyway.
The school says they discovered the problems, self-reported them and they are working to fix them.
In the meantime, they will be sitting out state tournaments in all sports for the next two years.
Let the word be spread to all of these little private schools popping up all over Indiana. You, who mysteriously have been in business for only a few years and have 70 students, but have compiled a roster of 12 basketball players who rank in the top 5 in 1A and make deep tournament runs, you are on alert. Your free run is over.
No more free passes.
Sportsmanship demands it.
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