The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
RH-Kirtland situation raises more questions
After five days of turmoil, inquiries and speculation, the focus returns to the field for the Richmond Heights football team.
Superintendent Renee Willis said that after talking with an OHSAA official this week, there would be no ruling or sanction by the governing body of Ohio high school sports after Richmond Heights coach Tim Gorham pulled his team from the field in the first quarter of a Sept. 21 game against Division VI state contender Kirtland.
Gorham’s reasoning? His team came into the game with 17 players and two had been hurt in the early going against the Hornets.
In an interview with The News-Herald on Sept. 25, Willis said parents didn’t want their children to go back into the game.
“When parents are saying to not put their child (in the game), you have no options,” Willis said. “As a school district, I’m not telling a parent, ‘I’m putting your child (in the game).’ Because our numbers are so small, when you have four parents say, ‘Don’t put my child in,’ then you don’t have enough players to line up.”
So Gorham’s concern was, and continues to be, legitimate. No coach is going to go against a parent’s wishes and put a player in a game they don’t want their child to be in.
But as the focus returns to the football field this week, plenty of questions remain going forward, and a dangerous precedent might have been set.
• Did Gorham do the right thing by pulling his team off the field and going home at the 6:37 mark of the first quarter? Good question. If Richmond Heights came to Kirtland’s Rogers Field with 17 players and two were hurt, that left 15 players — enough to continue playing.
However, it’s understandable that numbers were an issue, and just because there are 15 players in uniform doesn’t mean all 15 are varsity-caliber players.
Let’s be clear, football is a different animal than other sports because there is an intense physical aspect to it.
For instance, in baseball, a team could be losing 20-0 after two innings and only have nine players. But, save for throwing at players’ heads, there is no danger of losing players to injury.
In football, losing players to injury comes into play.
That being said, it’s
pretty much an unprecedented move to pull a team from the field in mid-game, which brings us to the next question ...
• Is there a penalty or punishment for a coach pulling his team from the field in mid-game?
Apparently not, neither on the state level nor at the league level, where the Chagrin Valley Conference said earlier this week it would abide by the ruling of the OHSAA.
Said CVC commissioner Don Lewis, “Nothing in the bylaws says anything about a team walking off the field and how they’d be penalized.”
Said Willis of her conversation with the OHSAA, “I got the feeling they went through the situation and looked at what rules were or could have been violated. Since there was nothing violated ... there’s nothing.”
So neither the OHSAA nor the CVC has a stipulation of how to deal with a coach pulling his/her team from the field in midgame. Should they? That leads to the next question.
• What’s to stop it from happening again, not necessarily at Richmond Heights, but at any school across America? In short, nothing. The slight-numbered Spartans play 5-0 Wickliffe this week.
When asked by The News-Herald on Sept. 25 about a similar situation to the Kirtland game coming up against the Blue Devils, Gorham responded, “I appreciate (the question), but I can’t go there.”
Again, this isn’t a Richmond Heights thing. But on a broader scale, what’s to stop any school in America from falling behind much worse than Richmond Heights did last week — again, it was 13-0 when the Spartans left the field — and calling it a day?
Is a precedent set now that if a team is down, say, 35-0 at the half and wants to conserve its resources for the next week and beyond, to just say, ‘Hey, we’ve had enough. We’re just going to head home, you know, and concede.”
Again, Richmond Heights’ situation is duly noted. The Spartans had only 15 healthy players at the time.
But going forward, what’s to stop any team from heading home in a game they can’t win whether it be because of numbers, talent level or just a desire to move on to the next game without getting anyone hurt?
• Is there a CVC problem with Kirtland being in the small-school division?
No. Let’s get this out there right now.
Kirtland is a Division VI school. It has the same enrollment of boys, grades 9 through 11 (which the OHSAA goes by for divisional alignments) as Cardinal with 152. It isn’t even the biggest school in the Valley Division.
It’s not Kirtland’s fault that the team is so successful that 49 percent (74 out of 152) of the boys are on the football team.
The CVC aligns football by enrollment. So Kirtland is in the division it should be in based on that.
• Should Kirtland volunteer to move up to the big-school Chagrin Division, or be told they must move up to the bigger division? Why should they? First, the Hornets are in the division they should be based on their enrollment. Penalizing Coach Tiger LaVerde’s program for its success and moving them up would be no different than moving down Harvey from the Chagrin to the Valley because the Red Raiders have struggled of late.
But Harvey (324 boys) has the biggest enrollment of the league’s 12 teams.
So moving teams around based on success can be a sticky situation.
• Will the CVC expansion that takes place next year help? In some way, yes. The CVC welcomes Lakeside, Edgewood, Trinity, Brooklyn, Lutheran West and Grand Valley into the league next year. The league will break up into three divisions for football, with the following alignment.
Chagrin Division: Lakeside, Chagrin Falls, Perry, Geneva, Harvey, West Geauga, Orange and Edgewood.
Metro Division: Cuyahoga Heights, Independence, Fairport, Richmond Heights, Trinity, Brooklyn and Lutheran West.
Valley Division: Beachwood, Berkshire, Wickliffe, Grand Valley, Kirtland, Cardinal and Hawken.
So by that standard, relief might be in sight.
But one big question remains ...
• What’s to stop any team in Ohio from walking off the field? Right now, nothing. Lopsided scores are going to happen. There will always be games were one team has a lot more players than the other.
Some question whether or not Richmond Heights should even have fielded a football team this year with only 17 players. The opportunity to play a sport at your school is a privilege, and one the Spartans are fortunate to have, so that decision is on the school district.
In 2015, Newbury canceled the final three games of its season when five players were injured in a game against Lutheran East, leaving the Black Knights with only 12 healthy players.
Richmond Heights might be dangerously close to that scenario.
On the local level, Gorham’s actions are very much understandable. He did what he felt was best for his kids and abided by his parents’ wishes to not put injured kids back into the game.
But on a broad scale — perhaps even a national scale — has a precedent been set?
Regardless of the reason — whether it’s concern over players getting hurt, a lopsided score in a game you can’t win or the desire for David to not face Goliath on a given day — is it OK for a coach to pull his team from the field in mid-game?
By all accounts, Richmond Heights doing so against Kirtland was a first.
It might not be the last.