Today I want to spend some time looking into what happened to an area high school that I think is a miscarriage of justice. Let me preface this with a few points before I jump into this: 1. Athletic department personnel, maybe more than any job in a school corporation, are not paid nearly to the ratio of the hours they work. From the athletic directors and their assistants to the secretaries, it’s really two jobs-in-one. They work a full day and then work four to six nights a week at games. No one appreciates more the people in our area athletic departments than I do. 2. I am all about rules, and I believe that we should all appreciate good rules and want to follow them for the good of all. 3. We all understand that life is not fair. All those things said, let me tell you a story about what happened at Northfield High School this fall. Clint Davis is the athletic director down there, but he didn’t take that job until early September – at the start of the week leading up to Week 4 of the football season. Davis was trying to play catchup in a job that would be extra hard to try to pull that off. Add to that the fact that Northfield is a small school district and not blessed with a huge staff. So Davis took a look at a spread sheet with the football players’ names and academic eligibility statuses, and he admittedly assumed that everything was ok. Unfortunately, everything was not ok. When Davis started to put together the Norse’s sectional roster for the IHSAA, he discovered a JV player who had only passed four classes last spring. That means he was ineligible for the beginning of this school year. At the time, Northfield was in the middle of a dream season. The perennial doormats of the Three Rivers Conference were undefeated at 7-0. Destined to play in the newly formatted TRC championship game featuring the top team from the North Division and the top team from the South Division last Friday. Then it all went very wrong. Further investigation found that this JV player was given an opportunity to get into four varsity games that Northfield clearly had in hand. He was rewarded for his hard work in practice by given “a couple of snaps” at the end of the blowout wins against Peru (42-26), Southwood (40-0), Tippecanoe Valley (59-7) and Manchester (65-6). Davis’ heart jumped into his throat, and then took a nose dive into his stomach. The guy who had been on duty as the AD at Northfield for about a month had to pull his coaches, players and parents together and tell them the bad news. Their dream season had turned into a nightmare. According to IHSAA rules, the use of an ineligible player by a team results in the forfeit of the game by that team. The rule is there for a reason and it’s a good rule and a good reason and I defend it … except for in this case and others we hear about almost every year just like it. There is a lot that went wrong here: • Northfield, and other schools who run into this same problem, should have checked their players’ eligibility after the roster came out and before the season started. Well sure, but that is the week leading up to the beginning of the school year. Any teacher or administrator will tell you that it’s the busiest two weeks of their school year. • The coach should have checked on it. Again, you have a small coaching staff at a 1A school who is trying to make sure everyone’s helmet fits right and all of their pads are the right size. But can I suggest that the IHSAA needs to take a look at the punishment for this, because it clearly doesn’t fit the crime in this scenario. The point of the rule is to keep kids who have not performed up to the required level in the classroom from participating in extra-curricular activities. If you don’t do the work in class, you shouldn’t get to play and I am fine with that 100 percent. But remember what we are talking about here: a JV kid played less than 10 snaps of four football games that his team was winning by more than two touchdowns when he got into the game. They were kneel-down plays. They were simple dives up the middle. They were meaningless. Except those handful of plays cost Northfield a chance at the TRC title and a perfect season. Isn’t that like trying to kill a fly with a sledgehammer? So the question is: “what is the alternative?” I would like to offer the following: • Set a deadline of noon on the Friday of the third week of the football season for schools to report to the IHSAA on the eligibility of their football teams. Most teams start conference play in Week 3, and that would allow already-taxed athletic departments a chance to check their players before the season gets too late. Part of the experience of playing high school sports is the joy of winning and pain of losing, and so winning a game by forfeit that you lost 57-6 is no real joy for anyone. • Remove the automatic penalty for using an ineligible player. The IHSAA should be allowed to review each case individually and hand down an appropriate penalty for that player and school. If a team wins a game by 40 points but they use a player for a few plays well after the game is decided, taking away those wins hurts kids who had NOTHING to do with the breaking of the rules. I would be in favor of putting the athletic department on probation for a calendar year, and then if other problems arise with that school the IHSAA could drop the hammer – hard. There IS a middle ground here and we need schools and the governing body of Indiana high school sports to do everything they can to find it. That way, what happened at Northfield doesn’t ever happen again.
