When I coached high school basketball, I was always irritated by the schools that got to recruit. Not only is it an unfair advantage, it just seems outside the spirit of high school sports.

In basketball if you get whooped, no one really hurt physically. But in football, it can be another story.

In Washington, there is a school named Archbishop Murphy. And as you may guess, they are a Catholic school. So what does that mean? It means they get to recruit. In fact they get to recruit within a 50 mile radius of their school. Guess what city is within those bounds? Seattle.

Archbishop Murphy is considered a 2A school, which is small for these parts. But there is nothing nothing small about the players on their team. They typically play public schools that are outside the Seattle Metro area and dominate the 2A level. This year they even beat a 4A school (4A is for the big boys) 70-0.

So why is this interesting? Well, Archbishop has not played in 4 weeks. Why? Well, the other 2A schools are forfeiting the games, citing the fear of getting injured. This is not unique to Washington, apparently this is happening in many other states.

Is this fear justified? Hard to tell. The new concussion scare is obviously some motivating factor, but I really believe that not the only reason. I think they also hate the unfair advantage Archbishop gets in all of this.

And who wouldn’t? I mean as competitive as I was as a coach (and I was hyper-competitive), it really is only high school. 2A high school at that. Having this huge disparity is just not fair.

I know what some of you will say; ‘Why forfeit? You are on;y just hurting the kids in this’. But honestly, what kind of protest would this be if you vehemently reject the situation, play the game, lose by 100, and just play again next season. Sometimes in life, in order to illicit real change, you have to do things that people notice and not like.

In defense of Archbishop, they have tried to move up to 3A, on;y to be rejected because the other schools are afraid they will lose players to them (all of this shows how petty adults can be when it comes to this stuff). But you can’t continue just having this team destroy the competitive element of an amateur sport for kids.

Anyway, it is an interesting issue that spans well beyond the scope of the PNW. I would really like to hear your comments on this, but I don’t open that option up due to not wanting to monitor your rantings. So maybe I really don’t want to hear your comments on this. Eh, I sort of do. So instead of opening up Discus, send me a letter at this address with your comments:

1234 Seattle Ave. Seattle, WA. 123456

I’ll love to hear your hot take.