After nearly 92,000 people from around the world signed a petition imploring the Michigan High School Athletic Association to allow a high school student with Down syndrome to play basketball and football during his senior year at age 20, the issue will be put to a vote.
The association's 1,500-plus member schools are expected to receive ballots this week asking whether the MHSAA should change its constitution to allow for a waiver of its maximum age limitation under narrowly defined circumstances. Schools have two weeks to return the ballots, which must be signed by the school principal and district superintendent; a two-thirds majority is required for the change to be adopted, and the association will post the wording of the proposal on its website no later than May 14.
Currently under MHSAA rules, a student who turns 19 prior to Sept. 1 of a given school year is not eligible for interscholastic athletics. Reports vary on the number of states (from 27 to approximately 40) that currently impose maximum age limits on student-athletes.
Dean Dompierre, whose son, Eric, has Down syndrome and will be 20 for the 2012-13 academic year at Ishpeming High School - the boy started elementary school later due to his disability - began the petition campaign on Change.org in March after the MHSAA disqualified Eric for next year. Dompierre and the Ishpeming School District have pitched multiple rule-revision proposals to the state association beginning in 2010 - including, according to the MHSAA, ones that would have allowed for a case-by-case evaluation of requests by student-athletes with Down syndrome and for student-athletes with any kind of disability. The organization's official response, based on input from between 500 and 600 schools: "After a very thorough review, it was determined that there should be no change to the MHSAA constitution."
In late March, Tom Rashid, associate director of the MHSAA, told AthleticBusiness.com that he expected organization officials to stand firm on that decision. "Their hearts go out to the kid, and they certainly want to help him, but if you did it for just one disability, why would you not allow a waiver for other disabilities?" Rashid said, citing autism as an example. "To measure what factors influence an unfair competitive advantage because of age - the height of a kid, the weight of kid, physical maturity - how do you successfully make those measurements and not sit in judgment? You just can't. The courts would define delineating those factors as an undue burden. … The consistent universal application of the age rule is really the smartest thing to do. We feel we have vetted it and discussed it widely."
Last week, Michigan's Senate Education Committee passed a resolution urging the MHSAA to consider adding the waiver. "I want to say up front the rule that is in place is a good rule and it has good intentions," Sen. Tom Casperson, a Republican from Escanaba who introduced the resolution, said, according to a USA Today report. "The problem that we're having is when the rule becomes so strict and so rigid that we can't see beyond the rule to have an exemption, then we may, as a society, have gone too far."
