ACHTUNG: This is not a “fair and balanced” story. It is an editorial by the editor.
Remember the University o
f Michigan’s “Fab Five” in basketball two decades ago? I thought about them when I watched Grand Rapids Christian methodically dissect one of Wayland High School’s best-ever basketball teams Tuesday night.
One fan said Christian assembled this team more than a year ago with one thing in mind — a state champion. The key word here is “assembled.” Though I have very little, if any, evidence, I still believe deep in my heart the Eagles’ basketball team is the product of legal recruiting run amok, thanks to the increasing privatization of public education, a State Legislature that 20 years supported and crafted laws that permit school districts to rob athletes from each other and our obsession with winning at all costs in athletics.
We accept recruiting at the big-time collegiate level (e.g. the Fab Five), but now it’s come down to the prep level and it continues to taint the supposedly wholesome and innocent characteristics of high school sports. Though we’re told at the beginning of every athletic contest about the importance of sportsmanship, good citizenship, respect for the rules and clean play, what really matters is winning.
This worship of winning at all costs can laid at the feet of our growing fondness of free-market capitalism, which always tells us “May the better man win.” This is fine, except when the ballgame is rigged and there are no referees, the end result of the process.
It was about 20 years ago that I argued with a former friend that Lansing’s Schools of Choice legislation would open the floodgates for wholesale athletic recruiting. He asserted instead the law would enable parents to send their children to better academic schools.
Schools of Choice is the permission for parents to send their kids to nearby school
s without penalty, and its results are obvious.
The former friend sent his child to neighboring school for athletic reasons, though he would argue that wasn’t the case. Later, as a coach, he was the victim when one of his star athletes was a no-show for a ballgame because he was taking part in some kind of tryout in another sport.
I hate to name names, but I will in one obvious case. GR Christian superstar Xavier Tillman, who will play for Michigan State next year, used to attend Forest Hills Central, but somehow wound up at Christian as a junior. His sister, I am told, remains at Forest Hills Central, so I find it hard to believe his transfer was all about religious considerations.
Wayland has at least three of its varsity players who don’t live in the local district, and one of them has a sister who is a hoops star at another school. So even families are split apart because of our lust for winning in the athletic arena.
Star athletes have been wooed and won in past years, before Schools of Choice, which today only makes the practice so much easier. Jamie “Shoes” Huffman transferred from Homer to Lansing Sexton to hitch his star to Magic Johnson in 1978. About that same time, Derek Crum left Albion to play for Ann Arbor Pioneer. Dean Hopson left Albion to play for Ann Arbor Huron. In those three cases, there were flimsy reasons such as going to live with an uncle.
But at least in those days such turncoats and their parents had to jump through some hoops so it didn’t happen nearly as often as it does now.
Some coaches last fall noted the preponderance of private religious schools that won football state championships or were in the state finals, suggesting that public schools have to play by much more rigid rules and Christian schools somehow are able to recruit the best athletes in their areas. They suggest it’s not an even playing field.
As recruiting rules have been relaxed and as education slowly is bled to death by privatizing, religion and clueless state legislators, indeed the game appears to be rigged. The best players seem to wind up on one team or a few and everybody else has to scramble for the crumbs.
This sounds a lot like sour grapes, but I smell something foul when a quality basketball team such as Wayland is hammered so badly by an opponent that, as one observer said, looks like a small college outfit. Grand Rapids Christian is perhaps, as an MLive reporter suggested, potentially a team for the era, but I must wonder how all of this came to be, how it was “assembled.”
I assert that Grand Rapids Christian’s basketball team was manufactured. To a much lesser degree, so is Wayland’s. That doesn’t make it right.
But as I so often maintain, when the game is played with no referees, when we just let everybody let it all hang out because of a free market application, the strong devour the weak. And it’s not fair.
I agree wholeheartedly Dave. Been saying the same thing for years now
Maybe there ought to be a conference for public schools and one for Catholic/Christian/Charter schools. If not during the regular season, at least in the Michigan State Football Playoff format. That might help in equity.
I doubt the MHSAA would agree, but it is a reasonable, alternative, equitable idea.
Our son played a sport well. We were approached by a coach of a parochial school, and were offered a full scholarship to the church affiliated high school. “But our family is not part of that religion,” I said. We were told that didn’t matter. We thought this was an example of the win at all costs credo. Our son did not adhere to the religious tenets of the school. But he could play. The school had a good academic program, I suppose, but our public school had stronger academic programs. Our son played at our public school, and did well, in his sport and in his education. While our son and his team were beating the church school later that year, we personally observed the coach of this other school encouraging unsportsmanlike conduct – cheating. “If god is with us, who can be against us?” was the motto displayed by that school.