Polk Law Blog

A group of Kathleen High School football fans and/or parents filed a complaint in Circuit Court in Bartow today seeking to have the Florida High School Athletic Association permit Kathleen to participate in the playoffs. As reported in the Ledger, the FHSAA decided to have Kathleen forfeit six games it had won, blemishing its perfect record, because of a problem involving the grades of one of the players. The Ledger does not provide a copy of the complaint, so I thought I would post one here for the curious. The Plaintiffs seek an immediate injunction to permit them to play their playoff game on Friday.

Needless to say this is an unusual case. It has been assigned to Judge Curry. According to the docket¹, there will be a hearing on the matter on Wednesday at 1:15pm. Here’s my take on this:

I think this case has very little chance of success. I have not done a thorough job of researching it, but looking only at a couple of cases (one of which was cited by the Touch Down Club’s own attorney), it appears that the law in Florida gives the FHSAA pretty wide discretion to do what it wants as long as it doesn’t substantially hurt someone’s economic interests and doesn’t act maliciously. Participation in high school athletics is not a “right” in the sense that freedom of speech or the press is and the courts will generally not interfere with a decision of a voluntary association like the FHSAA.  For a brief summary of the law, see FHSAA v Marazzito. For a much more detailed discussion, read FHSAA v. Melbourne Central Catholic High School. In both cases, the trial court granted an injunction that compelled the FHSAA to change its decision, and the appeals court reversed the trial court’s ruling. That second case may seem like Chinese to a non-lawyer – it’s definitely not for the impatient.

The Touch Down Club bases their entire complaint on an allegation that someone at Bartow High School inappropriately accessed the grades of the Kathleen football team and then held back the incriminating info until it would mess up the playoff opportunity. I don’t think that fact really has anything to do with the legal case. According to the Ledger, the violation was self-reported to the FHSAA by Kathleen High School. The FHSAA presumably had no part in what the Bartow people are accused of. Therefore, whether the Bartow people acted inappropriately is probably not going to be something that will affect how the court views the actions of the FHSAA.

Off the top of my head, I think a better argument in this case might have been based on the equal protection clause of the US Constitution. Even though some of the case law implies that participation in high school athletics is not a protected right, an argument could be made that the FHSAA acted in an arbitrary way by punishing other Kathleen students for something that really had nothing to do with them. I’m not saying that’s a strong legal argument, but I think it might have been a better one. Further research may convince me differently.

Unfortunately for the players at Kathleen who did nothing wrong, unless the FHSAA reverses itself, I think they will be out of the playoffs. But I look forward to seeing what the court does with this one. You never know.

11/4/09 – minor edits for clarity

1. You may need to click that link more than once to get a cookie to see the file. [↩]