[The fourth in a series on sanctioning and its impact on the high school athletes the rules are intended to help. See Sanctioning Crisis series index.]

Just how did we get into this mess anyway?

The "mess," of course is the situation which confronts high school track today. Once an open sport, it is now one where the best runners cannot meet unless they go to a non-scholastic affair, such as the MAC competition which finally allowed Janine Davis of Queen of Peace NJ and Devon Williams of Towson Catholic MD to get together last Sunday at the New York Armory in a 600M race which produced a national record for Davis.

The schools they attend are very similar with one exception. Queen of Peace is a member of the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association (NJSIAA after this) while Towson Catholic is not (and some say cannot be) a member of the Maryland Public High School Athletic Association (MPHSAA). And there's, as a poet once said, the rub.

Some states, New Jersey among them, do not care who their members compete against, as long as they face only high school teams, not clubs. Others, particularly New York, have a different policy and require each opponent to receive an endorsement from its home state association even if it is not a member.

The situation first surfaced at the Manhattan College cross-country meet in 2003. Days before the meet, director Ed Bowes---a man who for many years coached the founding school of the sport as we know it today, Bishop Loughlin of Brooklyn---was told by offcials of the New York State Public High School association that if certain schools competed in the meet, their members would have to withdraw.

The specific target of this policy seemed to be St. Benedict's Prep of Newark, which on three occasions over the years has been a full member of the NJSIAA but is now just an affiliate member along with other traditional prep schools which form the New Jersey Independent Schools Athletic Association, but others got caught up in the situation, among them two middle school students who were entered in a race for 7th and 8th graders. They became innocent victims since the NJSIAA cannot certify elementary schools students who are not---in contrast to New York---allowed to compete in high school competitions in their state.

Bowes was particularly torn by the situation since he and St. Benedict's coach Marty Hannon were classmates at Loughlin. In the end, St. Benedict's did compete, but needed an injunction to do so this past fall. Finally, this winter, the NJSIAA, confronted with its own constitution, agreed that NJISAA members were affiliates of the state association and the problem was solved, but only in New Jersey.

The New York official who started all this says that he is just enforcing the rules, but they seem to be rules which New York is responsible for. Three years ago, it joined the National Federation of High School Athletic Associations in developing the policy which is now being enforced by at least half a dozen states.

This is the way it happens. Any "outside" group sponsoring an interstate meet must send a list of the states it intends to invite to the national federation, which then refers the matter to the indidvidual state associations.

In former years, that ended the matter as far as the national federation was concerned. Meet directors dealt with the separate states who either did or did not approve the meet for their members, without concern for what other schools might be there. Connecticut was one the the regular naysayers, Delaware another, among the Northeastern schools, the area where most interstate indoor competitions in track and field take place.

But this policy was changed about 3 years ago. Now, each meet director must furnish the various associations with a full list of competing schools. New York, for one, sends forms to each state association with teams on the list and asks them to indicate if each school is 1) a member; 2) an approved non-member; or 3) is unapproved.

This policy applies to any contest among two or more schools if it is conducted by an outside group or to four or more in any case. But the two or more is a moot question; such competitions are almost never, if ever, "sponsored" by anyone except the schools involved. And, for practical purposes, the rule applies in any meaningful fashion only to track and field; in no other sport would more than a handful of schools (and those only once or twice) be affected during the school year. It would never, ever, apply to the "king" of high school sports, football.

That is the situation, but there is still the mystery of how it happened. And, for that, we must look at the National Federation, a relatively shadowy instituion to the general public, but one that has directly or indirectly, exerted ever-greater power over interscholastic sports since its formation about 80 years ago.

The federation was initially created for the same reason as the NCAA, to write a football rulebook. In the case of the NCAA, this was an emergency situation; President Theodore Roosevelt had threatened to ban the sport unless something was done to reduce the large number of deaths and crippling injuries the occurred annually. Among other things, this gave us the forward pass (and eliminated the "flying wedge").

In the case of the national federation, it was to get one rulebook for the entire nation so that when a team did cross state lines for a game, it would play under the same rules it did at home. From that beginning, the federation has grown to its present eminence (largely after WW II)

Aside from the sanction rule, the federation has little direct power. But the fact is that almost all meaningful legislation in the verious member states over the past 25-30 years has originated in the annual national meetings held each June. Model rules are developed there and come back to the states which offer them to the membership, which usually pass them.

But not always. A few years ago, New Jersey proposed one of these rules concerning summer contact between coaches and athletes. The membership turned it down by a considerable margin. The next day, newspapers reported the then executive director of the association as saying "We must do something about this situation." Just which "we" he was talking about is something of a mystery; his "we," the school members certainly didn't think so. That executive director, Robert Kanaby, now heads the national federation.

And there are further problems with the statement of the New Yoik official about "enforcing the rules." For the policy now spreading among the states has some obvious Constitutional problems, among them:

1) The Constitution limits regulation of interstate commerce to the Congress. When entry fees for track and field meets cross state lines, that is interstate commerce if the words have any meaning. So what is a high school athletic association doing when it starts saying who can or cannot enter otherwise open meets.

2) The Supreme Court made it quite clear in the days of the civil rights movement that public accommodations must be open to everyone. It is perfectly understandable when an association (or a conference) limits a championship meet to its own members, but the meets involved here are something else, open to any schools in a wide geographic area. Moreover, track and field is by definition an individual sport, so it is not a case of keeping a school out of a meet, but rather a boy or girl, otherwise perfectly eligible, who doesn't go to the "right" school.

3) As already noted, the policy definitely targets a single sport and one that is probably the best example of what real sportsmanship is all about. New Jersey, like other states, keeps records of how many athletes are disqualified for unsportsmanlike conduct each year; the numbers in track and field---numerically one of the largest of all sports--have never reach double figures and, in some seasons there has not been a single disqualification in the entire state.

Nor is this a case of merely negative sportsmanship, athletes not doing something they shouldn't. As a close observer of the sport for more than 60 years, I have witnessed countless incidents of positive sportsmanship and heard about others, like the time two-cross-country runners were in a close race when one was almost knocked out by a low tree branch. His rival stopped, stayed with him until he was ready to run again and, in the end, it was the stricken lad who won the race.

In New Jersey, we would not have much of an indoor program if it were not for cooperation of coaches in various areas to promote meets through their county or area associations. The "outside" organizations referred to sponsor meets, not for financial or other gain, but to give youngsters a chance to compete.

The fact is that, at least in my part of the country, this new policy has attacked not just a sport, but a family. And that is likely to defeat it in the end. When the St. Benedict's boys were barred from the outdoor Easterns last June, it was a public school athlete from a rival school who asked me at our state all-group meet what I thought about the action

And there is one more thing for New York public officials to consider. New York City is now among the finalists to become host to the 2012 Olympic Games, which are devoted to bringing together athletes from all nations, whatever their differences might be, in friednly competition.

What would the IOC committee think if it were to learn that the very city and state which are bidding for the Games are allowing a state official---the New York association is run by the state Department of Education; the New York City PSAL is its "partner" in this matter---to bar youngsters from simply crossing state lines to compete?