Baseball stands ordered torn down for being better than softball's

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/highschool-prep-rally/baseball-parents-ordered-to-take-down-seats-deemed-superior-to-softball-bleachers-210604955.html

"The U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation following an anonymous complaint. Ultimately, officials demanded that the seating and scoreboard be torn down because the upgrades are superior to Plymouth's girls' softball facilities. The boys' seating is also not handicap accessible, which is a separate violation of government regulations."

 

I guess the softball parents could hold their own fundraisers, no?

 

While they're at it, the Plymouth school district:




.... should get ready for a friendly little phone call from the....





Seems like the Plymouth athletic department has a lot of people with the attitude of, "We're just going to go and do whatever the hell we want," without worrying very much about any possible consequences.

 

and hold quite successful ones. There is no shortage of cash in that district.

Not sure I would call it "across town" since the two schools are .8 miles apart

http://www.pccs.k12.mi.us/sites/pccs.k12.mi.us/files/shared/district-map-20120801.pdf

 

The aluminum bleachers shown at the softball facility are much better than the seating structures at about 98% of the HS baseball fields I have ever seen.

 

All three high schools are that close. Even more unique, there's a good chance that players from opposite teams/schools have a class together.

 

High schools co-opting professional logos is common practice. Very few pro teams are dumb enough to sue.

 

Using Title IX as an argument for this is quite possibly one of the dumbest fucking things in the history of dumb fucking Title IX arguments.

"Equal opportunity" has nothing to do with bleachers or scoreboards. You want nice bleachers? Raise the fucking money like the baseball parents did.

 

It's not that college and pro teams really care if some podunk high school copies their logo, but if they don't at least send a cease and desist letter and tell them to change it courts might rule they aren't making an effort to protect their copyright. Then they can't licence their apparel.

This school might be OK. There are some subtle difference between that logo and Nashville. The eye is different and so is the striping in the middle. The changes don't really have to be big. Ever notice the tiny little notch in the bottom of Clemson's paw logo? That's so they can copyright it as something different than every other paw out there.

 

My response was more focused on Starman's assertion that this is a program with an "attitude of we're going to do whatever the hell we want." I don't see the logo as some sort of attitude problem with the administration.

I get what you're saying about protecting the copyright, but yeah, as you noted, the logo is sufficiently different enough that they'd probably be OK.

 

Yeah.... about that....
The school's original mascot was going to be the Predators ... until (yeah, you know where this is going)... a handful of the usual PC folks with nothing else to do questions the district's need to name its athletic teams after of group of people that preys on children and women. Yeah, sexual predators.
So because they worried about being viewed as insensitive, they changed the name from Predators to Wildcats.

 

I'm not a legal scholar, but I can't see as how this is a violation. If I understand correctly, the school system didn't spend the money to upgrade the facilities; the parents did it themselves.