| 4/20/2004 -- The Penn Relays is in a class by itself as a track and field competition. A friend of mine told me of bringing a pair of high German track and field officials to the meet several years ago, men who had seen everything there was in the sport; Olympics, world championships, European championships by the carload, but he said they were completely overwhelmed by what they saw at Franklin Field that weekend and still talk about it.
It is unfortunate that a group of people who actually have little or no interest in our sport have managed to throw a damper on the 110th edition of the meet which begins Thursday at 10 a.m., touching off an almost continuous round of action which will not end until 6 p.m. on Saturday. In that time, quite literally, athletes from seven to past 70 will demonstrate their skills to crowds that will dwarf those seen at any other meet in the United States this year, including the Olympic Trials.
The action of the New York and Connecticut athletics officials is beyond contempt. It is also almost ludicrous in its targets: some of the oldest and finest school in this country, schools which have been attended by thousands of our national leaders in the past century or more, some of whom, in their schooldays, themselves competed on the last weekend of April at Franklin Field.
The oldest scholastic race in the Relays is the prep school championship which was first run in 1899, two years before the high school race.In the century or so since then, there have been times when the prep schools and high schools ran together in the other championship races and times when they were separated. Separate prep school champions in the two-mile and distance medley relays ended in 1940, but what are now referred to as "independent schools" have run in the high school championships since then and one will be in the DMR this year. It is a good question whether they will be able to in the future.
New York and Connecticut (and Massachusetts as well) have taken the position that their schools would somehow be contaminated by competing against these independent schools. They imply that these schools have some kind of unfair advantage simply because they do not choose (or in some cases are unable) to join the official state associations. Without any proof, they charge these schools with using fifth-year students, ignoring the fact that, in the case of New York, six-year careers are permitted by allowing seventh-graders to compete for the public high school they will eventually (though not necessarily) attend.
At present, it seems the separation does not affact any of the "invitation" events, the 3200R and DMR and the various individual events. But that changes nothing in the overall picture: the schools that have been ousted frorm the 400MR and 1600MR trials are, for the most part, guilty only of making the free choice of not joining their state associations, if, indeed they would be welcome there in the first place. There is one team which never should have been in the high school races in the first place, Army Prep of Fort Monmouth, NJ, which is entirely composed of post-graduate students preparing to enter the U.S.Military Academy.
Virginia Catholic schools have formed a tri-state conference of their own which includes basketball (and now track) power, DeMatha of Maryland.
Not only is discrimination against certain schools involved in this situation, but also discrimination against our sport. The leverage for what New York and Connecticut have done comes from the requirement (basically, without any legal foundation) that interstate events with a certain number of participants require a sanction from the participating states. The way these are obtained is through the least-known, and possibly most powerful, athletic group in this country, the National Federation of State High School Athletic Associations. The NFSHSAA does not confer the sanction itself; it simply receives the request from the sponsoring organizations of the event and then passes them on to the state associations who then do, or do not, approve it.
Trouble in this direction started last fall when a New Jersey school, St. Benedict's, was told, as in this case, on the very eve of the event that it could not compete in the Manhattan cross-country invitational. The reason given was that when a list of New Jersey schools entered in the meet was sent to the national federation and then sent to the New Jersey state association, the latter said that it was not authorized to approve the sanction for non-members. Eventually, the Gray Bees---the school referred to above as being in the DMR and which has been competing at Penn for almost a century and first won a championship race in 1934---did run at the Manhattan meet with its star, Bryan Scotland, winning one of the races, but were subsequently barred at the Brown Invitational----even though they were competing against New Jersey member schools regularly within the state. They anticipated problems at the New York Armory meets during the winter, but these never arose.
What makes track and field the special target is that the number of large interstate competitions in our sport are far greater than those in all the other sports on the high school calendar combined. In the area most affected by the Penn Relays, there would be little or no indoor season without the almost weekly events at the NY Armory and similar arenas in other cities, notably Boston. The sanctioning rule does not affect football at all and touches basketball only in holiday time tournaments. Even the sport most analogous to ours, swiimming, uually involves only one or at most two such competitions during a season.
Another ludicrous element is provided by the presence at Penn of teams from a dozen or more island nations, notably Jamaica, which can hardly be members of American state associations and, in addition, have school systems that differ so greatly from ours that it is almost impossible to make a comparison.
But what really tears it is the fact that any time one of the state associations is brought to court, the first thing they claim is "ours is a voiluntary organization and it is only reasonable that those who choose to join should abide by our rules." When, however, these associations take such actions as New York and Connecticut have done, punishing athletes and schools for simply being what they are, they can hardly claim to be voluntary, as they may find out sooner than they imagine.
For the action in moving schools from one 400M or 1600M relay to another is hardly a punishment---it merely reinstates prep "class" race which were for many years a feature of the Relays and were only completely abandoned in the last decade or so--it will be quite a different thing if a team is someday ejected from the 3200 or DMR fields for the separate prep school races which were abandoned more than six decades ago are unlikely to be reinstated. Were St. Benedict's a New York or Connecticut school, the issue would have arised this year.
And, while New York has removed a threat for punishing its schools which might (and will) run against non-member schools from other states---as will John Jay, among others, against the Gray Bees in the DMR---this is evidently a one-year policy, prompted by the lateness of its action, it could well be reinstated next year. In that case, the only honorable thing for the Penn authorities to do would be to tell New York to go fly a kite and have a meet of their own that weekend.
As far as the "educators" who instituted these policies are concerned, it is painfully obvious they they have no business having anything to do with training young people to live in a diverse democracy such as we have in this country. The sooner they retire the better.
Ed Grant
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