Deep State Downstate

You want to know the location of the “deep state,” that nexus of power working to thwart the will of the people?  Well, my friends, it ain’t in Washington or northern Virginia.  Try downstate Illinois instead, Bloomington to be exact.  That’s the home of the Illinois High School Association, an organization as deep as it gets.

The IHSA is supposed to work like the state equivalent of the NCAA, on a high school level, only the IHSA makes the NCAA look competent in comparison.  Apparently, sometime in the distant past the board that represents 800-plus schools in Illinois passed a rule that cancels athletics for any school undergoing a strike.  As you might imagine, that rule hasn’t exactly been popular with Chicago Public Schools’ athletes and/or their parents during the recent CPS teachers’ strike.

The IHSA did bend its rules to allow CPS football teams to participate in the state playoffs but wouldn’t do the same for cross-country runnrs, which led to a lawsuit which led to a judge’s ruling that the CPS runners be allowed to participate.  The IHSA was less than pleased with the decision.

Its director basically told the Tribune today athletics and academics go together or not at all.  “When schools are on strike, we don’t have the educational piece going on,” he said.  “I’ve got to believe at some point in our history, it was important to the rule-makers that we maintain education and sports together.”  You imagine?  Why don’t you know that for a fact?

The director was also quoted in today’s Sun-Times, charging that the judge’s ruling “creates a dangerous legal precedent that hampers our ability to uphold the rules put into place by our member schools [though exactly when he can’t say], and has far-reaching implications that impact the finality and integrity of any IHSA event.”  In other words, rules are rules.    

I’d think an organization like the IHSA would understand that good rules work while bad ones lead to lawsuits.  Leadership in the truest sense of the word would discard any and all rules demonstrated to be bad.  An organization purporting to champion student athletes shouldn’t be fighting to protect the right to keep rules that punish athletes for situations beyond their control.  Then again, I don’t belong to the deep state downstate.