HS team forfeits playoff game for wearing pink

[Gothamite]

i certainly don't have a copy of the california high school athletics rule book in front of me, so i'm not citing any specifics, but i feel as though the wording of the rule may be a bit cloudy anyway.

Is anybody involved suggesting such a thing?

[The_Admiral]

No one's obligated to do anything! It's a bunch of seventeen-year-olds. American public high schools are already Kafkaesque hellholes of rules and doors and technicalities and pathetic low-rent administrative confusion. Let people at least loosen up for extracurriculars. If kids on a basketball team want to tie-dye their uniforms because they're going through a Grateful Dead phase or something, then wtfever. It'd be something to look back on and smile about as adults when their lives are really crushed by the massive gears of the real world.

[TVIXX]

REALLY?

[Sport]

I don't see how a coach being suspended for the rest of the playoffs is a fair compromise. What advantage was gained by the pink uniforms?

Just tell them not to wear the pink uniforms from here on out and everybody moves on.

[gdu]

No one's obligated to do anything! It's a bunch of seventeen-year-olds. American public high schools are already Kafkaesque hellholes of rules and doors and technicalities and pathetic low-rent administrative confusion. Let people at least loosen up for extracurriculars. If kids on a basketball team want to tie-dye their uniforms because they're going through a Grateful Dead phase or something, then wtfever. It'd be something to look back on and smile about as adults when their lives are really crushed by the massive gears of the real world.

Not all of us hated high school...or the real world.

[The_Admiral]

Well, that ad hominem really made me rethink my approach.

[MJWalker45]

I don't see how a coach being suspended for the rest of the playoffs is a fair compromise. What advantage was gained by the pink uniforms?

Just tell them not to wear the pink uniforms from here on out and everybody moves on.

The coach was suspended due to being a repeat offender, as far as breaking league rules, not the uniform rule though.

[gdu]

Well, that ad hominem really made me rethink my approach.

If you took that as a personal attack, no wonder you have the perspective you do about HS and the real world.

And I couldn't care less about making you rethink your approach. I gave my opinion, you responded with WGAF about what uniforms high school sports teams wear, I said it wasn't about that-it was about not having rules you aren't going to enforce and you went on to complain about high schools and the real world.

At no point was I trying to attack you or change your mind about anything. I've got my opinion and don't expect everyone, or anyone, to share it. Feel free to have whatever opinion you'd like about pink uniforms, enforcement of rules, HS and the real world.

[The_Admiral]

But you have to understand that "well, that's the rule, and they broke it, and they have to be punished" is a mentality that, unless you have a career in computer science, is incompatible with real life. Even cops and judges let people off with warnings. Sometimes people break good rules for good reasons. Sometimes people break bad rules for good reasons. Sometimes people break rules for bad reasons but everything manages to keep functioning because it wasn't that important in the first place. And then you have high schools, where there are so many rules flying around that you practically need to buy the program to tell which are the good ones and which are the bad ones. OPTIONAL DIGRESSION:

I was always a fan of living and dying by the bells, such that teachers would lock their doors right after the bells rang so that anyone who was late would be locked out and not let in. Oh, the bathroom was busy? You should have thought about that before you consumed fluids. Now I won't let you learn. Then, roaming the hallways, you would get yelled at for being where you were while not being allowed to be where you were supposed to be, thus consigning students to some sort of interstitial oblivion where no state of existence was officially permitted. Presumably, you were supposed to report to in-school suspension for the balance of the period, but in practice, kids just banged on the doors until the teachers realized the policy was stupid and let the damn kids in, or they wandered around like they looked like they had somewhere important to be, or they hung out in classic high school hidey-holes like practice rooms or gym mezzanines, or, in the most lost of causes, they just went back to the bathrooms and got high.

Anyway, for better or worse, the pinkwashing trend has been so ubiquitous in professional and pseudo-professional (read: college) sports that impressionable kids have it in their heads that taking things that are not normally a particular shade of pink and making them a particular shade of pink is the accepted means by which one demonstrates and raises funds for breast cancer awareness. Whatever our grown-up thoughts may be on Komen media-blitzing and the folly of further raising awareness of something which one would think is just about at peak awareness levels, this is the weird consumer reality we live in, and if these kids -- who, for all we know, may have perfectly good personal reasons for caring this much about breast cancer -- want to do this, you're not going to make the world a better place by giving them an elaborate lecture on the emptiness and, quite frankly, the darkness of the whole Komen marketing machine, and you sure as hell aren't going to make the world a better place by punishing them for violating high-school-athletic-federation uniform protocol.

And oh, by the way, not sure if it made national news yet, like the rest of the Jackie Robinson West scandal did, but the Little League coach from the neighboring district who did all the investigating to make sure everyone was playing by the rules because the rules are important and without following the rules we'll all descend into anarchy? OPTIONAL DIGRESSION:

Following the rules is especially important when you represent an exclusionary white suburb in the black ocean of Chicago's south side and those black kids are boatracing your white kids, and it doesn't seem wholly coincidental that we're talking about black kids here, too.

He just got popped for getting 'faced, chasing a woman down, and banging on her front door trying to get into her house. Now I'm not necessarily saying that every adult who is overly concerned with the bureaucratic minutiae of children's lives is probably a mean drunk with bad intentions, but it certainly wouldn't throw the planet off its axis if we all lightened up about stupid crap that doesn't really matter.

Now let's get back to discussing these wordmarks! The school's name is "Narbonne," but the wordmarks just say "Bonne"? These uniforms bite, blow, and suck. And look at the logo creep! Go away, Nike.

[TheOldRoman]

The Jackie Robinson stuff doesn't have anything to do with this (I know admiral didn't bring it up first) because the coaches knowingly cheated and took kids from outside their boundaries. They cheated to win and then tried to force other teams into redrawing boundaries to cover up their cheating. This high school wasn't cheating. And if you don't have any issue with coaches redrawing boundaries or breaking rules to win, then I don't know what to say.

[gdu]

nm

[Xist2inspire]

I find it funny that the "Alternate uniform overkill" fad started at the highest levels first, and has gradually trickled down to the lower levels. Likewise, I find it funny that high schools (where it really shouldn't matter) have rules against it, while the pros and college (where it probably should), don't seem to care.

[WavePunter]

i certainly don't have a copy of the california high school athletics rule book in front of me, so i'm not citing any specifics, but i feel as though the wording of the rule may be a bit cloudy anyway.

Is anybody involved suggesting such a thing?

I don't know whether they are or not, but if it were my team being banned from the playoffs for a trivial reason, I'd be looking for every angle possible to have them and myself back in the playoffs.. And my main point here is that they're trying to enforce a rule that may not be very clearly stated, or in fact, may be contradictory.. From what little research I've done, the California HS governing body defers to the NFHS rulebook, which makes no reference to uniform colors other than "white" and "dark".. So using ONLY that logic, and assuming there somewhere exists a sub-rule stating that all uniforms must be only official school colors, then the rule itself could be considered contradictory, because white is not one of narbonne's colors, yet a separate rule is saying they must wear white, which is not an official school color.. Once again, I know I'm nitpicking, but so are those who originally punished the team..

[slapshot]

I can see a heavy fine, or something, but unless it was something that could somehow prevent them or their opponent from playing good, then that just seems a but much to make them forfeit,

Hard to fine a public high school. Its not like the school is a money making entity.

This brings up a good point...what's the point of buying a team special uniforms in the first place? Unless they're going to be raffled off to raise money for the specific charity, then they're specifically the "look at me" type of pandering that sours a lot of people on the awareness theme in the first place.

At least in the pros, and many colleges, there's a market for game used merchandise. So those camouflage and pink uniforms are being bought, and (in theory) the money raised goes to charity.

Is there a market for game worn high school merchandise? Doubtful. It's peer pressure. No one wants to feel left out of any bandwagon, especially something that starts in the pros and trickles down to the school level.