Jesse Kellogg, who now works for a Hooters in Clarksville, Tenn., was one of a dozen rising Brentwood Academy ninth graders invited by the school in the spring of 1997 to spring football practice, a transaction that eventually spiraled into a 10-year-old lawsuit between Brentwood and the [Tennessee Secondary School Athletics Assocation] TSSAA.The lengthy article by Bokupic is worth attention in full. One matter I wish were made more explicit (altho it's all there) is the sphere-sovereignty-blurring long stretch from the state, to the schools, to the athletic associations which are arguably not educational in an appropriately school-specific way (but arguably educational in their own non-school way). This becomes important in regard to the driving force of the athletic association in using the schools to recruit a pool from which a pre-pro cohort will be selected, promoted, and feed the universities and colleges their successive generations of cultivated near-professional athletes.
WASHINGTON — A dispute that traces to a football scrimmage on a grassy high school practice field in suburban Nashville is now in the nation's highest legal arena, where the dueling parties say it could have consequences for student sports nationwide.
In the backdrop of the case to be argued at the Supreme Court on Wednesday are concerns about the exploitation of budding athletes and the soundness of rules set by state athletic associations.
More broadly, the case could affect the latitude that school or other government-related associations have to impose conditions on individuals in their programs.
"The implications of the legal issues go far beyond the facts in the case," says Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women's Law Center, one of more than a dozen groups that filed "friend of the court" briefs in the case.
In the spring of 1997, Brentwood Academy football coach Carlton Flatt sent a letter to 12 eighth-grade boys admitted to the private school for the fall, inviting them to spring football practice. The school, which had won state football championships in 1995 and 1996, is still known for its athletics and has sent graduates to Auburn University and other football powers.
As such, it turns out that the universities use the university elite athletes (with an on-campus hierarchy among the sports selected for support, a hierarchy narrowing often (at the top) to the elite of elites, college football players ... and it's these few who have the background as a result to "turn pro"). So, the universities affinity for over-funding and over-statussing the pre-pro crew, feeds back to wag the secondary schools as the universities' dogs/tails. The secondaries in being assimilated to their "athletic programs" (which are actually in a separate association for age-specific players, not merely enkaptic within the schools as one among several departments), these secondaries end up in the unconscionable position of being party to manipulating eith-graders. This is a fundamental violation of the responsiblity of secondary schools.
More than that, the parents of the minors involved are not mentioned at all. Family (parents/child/sibs nexus of relationshps typically) is another societal sphere of authority and decision-making that doesn't factor into this quarrel between athletic organizations, the wannabe alpha dogs that want to wag the tail which turns out to the schools. Not vice versa! The framework of jurisprudence thru which the case is approached turns out to be a quarrel between state, school, and athletic organizsations as to who is more primarily in loco parentis. But where are the parents? Where is an association of parents willing to bear responsiblity in the face of all three other spheres with standing? The idea that the state should be the all-determining nanny for these boys (at the time, 1997) in their relations to an athletic assocation, united in a state organization to which at the start the schools already do seem overly servile, is itself flawed.
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