Officious pricks that run high school athletics for $500, Alex

that's not interpretation -- that's discretion. and, in this case, officials decided that coach had been warned enough and it was time to do something about it.

 

Yes, they made a judgment call. In my opinion, they judged wrong.

 

and that's fine by me. but my thinking is that a coach that knows he's in violation of a rule -- something he was told on several occasions and should have known in the first place -- can't complain if something's finally done about it.

a cop may let me off with a warning for going 4 or 5 miles over the limit. several may. and then I might catch the guy that doesn't care. I get a ticket. it sucks, and I may think he should have let me go with another warning, but that doesn't make the last cop wrong. I was speeding. I knew it and I'd been warned before.

 

It's a stupid rule and was stupidly enforced.
If the IHSA people had any class, they would have handed the North Lawndale coach a roll of white tape and told him to cover the offending inch of stripe on each jersey before the game.
If the other coach has a sense of fairness, he tells his kid to miss the free throw.
The end, as jps would say.

 

North Lawndale quite clearly decided they didn't give a fuck about violating the rule, since they came back and played in the same jerseys AGAIN after being teed up the first time. (There are plenty of T-shirt shops in the great state of Illinois, if you absolutely had to, it would be quite possible to come up with 15 incontestably-legal, although maybe not very bad-ass looking, uniform shirts, in a matter of a couple of hours). Apparently somewhere along the line they decided the rules simply do not apply to them, no matter how many times they are told.

That's a wonderful lesson we should be conveying to high school students.

Is it a stupid rule? Yeah, probably it is.

In that case, voters should storm the next NFHSA rules meeting and change the rule.

In the meantime, you don't get to simply ignore rules you think are stupid. I think it's stupid you can't dribble with both hands or wear sharp metal studs on the outside of your jersey; that doesn't mean you get to do it.

 

One more (and hopefully final) commentary on the matter from Peoria. It's the last note in the link below.

UNIFORMLY SPEAKING: The controversy regarding Chicago North Lawndale’s uniforms will not die. Both of Chicago’s major dailies made it front-page news, and the story was picked up by a number of national outlets. ...

... To me, the irony of this situation was on full display in Saturday’s news conference following the 3A third-place game. Every member of the North Lawndale team and coaching staff came into the interview room, which I can’t ever recall happening before. Each member of the staff, including the pre-teen ball boys, were dressed to the nines. Three-piece suits, silk handkerchiefs, gold pocket watches ... you name it, just about every accessory of the over-dressed urban sophisticate except a top hat and cane was on display.

I can only think that if the coaching staff had put one-tenth of the effort into outfitting its players as it did itself, North Lawndale likely would have won a second consecutive state title.

http://www.pjstar.com/sports/x110664665/Stewart-Still-nothing-like-prep-basketball

 

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