Group preparing legal action to play sports
There’s a growing sentiment in Metro Detroit boys basketball coaching circles that the most prudent course of action right now is to consider ditching the MHSAA for the 2021 season and create a club league for players on the weekends in Ohio and Indiana this winter.
In the wake of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services announcing yet another push-back of the season from Feb. 1 to Feb. 21 for full-contact athletics played indoors (as a result of COVID-19 concerns), chatter is emerging from the Catholic League that seems to indicate CHSL Central coaches are ready to lead the way to a non-MHSAA sanctioned campaign played in out-of-state gyms.
The idea was first floated publicly by Detroit U-D Jesuit head coach Pat Donnelly in an interview with The Detroit News on Sunday.
“I’ve been contacted by some people to start a club team so we can play out of state. We need to play,” said Donnelly, pointing to the fact that hundreds of kids need to get on the floor so college coaches can evaluate them for scholarships and that the numbers and data support allowing carefully-monitored contact play in-line with 45 of the 50 states.
California’s non-contact order expires next week. Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada and New York are the only other states besides Michigan still holding back their high school teams from competing.
On Monday afternoon, Birmingham Brother Rice head coach Rick Palmer tweeted: “Our kids will play a game on February 6. I hope it’s an MHSAA game in Michigan, but we will play a game somewhere. I hope I can coach the game, but whether I can or cannot, that won’t stop us (from playing).”
Defending CHSL Central champion Orchard Lake St. Mary’s, set to be the No. 1 team in the state again this season, saw a good bulk of its lineup form a club team late last year and travel to prep school tournaments out of state for competition. Eaglets head coach Todd Covert never convened non-contact practice or workouts to allow for his players club-league activity under MHSAA rules.
The CHSL Central is as talent rich
as it has been in quite a while. St. Mary’s has Mr. Basketball candidate Julian Roper (Northwestern) and a lineup that features a halfdozen college-bound players. UD-Jesuit has spunky Sonny Wilson at the point and Brother Rice has Curtis Williams, the state’s No. 1 sophomore, on the wing, and Novi Christian transfer John Blackwell, one of the top floor generals in the state’s Class of 2023.
The proposed club team league concept would have no affiliation with the high schools the players come from. Under MHSAA rules, they couldn’t be coached by their MHSAA coach either. The St. Mary’s players compete under the team name Michigan Elite.
Coaches and players have come together in a #LetUsPlay movement on social media seeking to convince Governor Whitmer and the MDHHS to reverse course and allow contact-play on the previous Feb. 1 start date and keep the MHSAA state finals on the final week in March. Many, if not all, of the state’s top players have AAU circuit commitments that begin the first week of April.
“This is about giving players opportunities to compete,” Palmer said. “We’ll give it another week and see where we’re at, but if at that point my players want to go off and get a club team together, I’m not going to stop them. What I do know and will tell them is that we are done sitting around waiting on another new start date from the state. Because
honestly, we could be waiting forever, then bang, a whole season down the drain and we all waisted our time preparing for something that was never going to happen in the first place.”
Palmer understands the MHSAA is in a tough spot.
“Hey, this isn’t the greatest of situations and it’s been like this for almost a year, we need to do what we can do to make the situation better not worse,” he said. “These kids need a win in the worst way. It’s been 10 months of getting kicked in the stomach over and over again. They need something to look forward to, whether that’s MHSAA sanctioned or not, I don’t know. I know my players will be playing a game on Feb. 6 and I know there are a lot of other teams’ players that will be doing the same.”