OLSM players’ lawsuit headed for court hearing
With the MHSAA rejecting their final appeal last week, Orchard Lake St. Mary’s sophomore basketball players, Jayden Savoury and Isaiah “Zip” Hines and their families will be in U.S. District Court in Downtown Detroit Friday morning seeking an injunction against the MHSAA’s ruling Savoury and Hines ineligible for the 2023 campaign due to transfer rules.
Neither the school, nor the MHSAA would comment on the situation. Savoury and Hines’ parents confirmed the court date and what they were hoping to achieve with it, specifically allowing their sons to salvage what’s left of their tenth-grade hoops season.
The 6-foot-6 Savoury (Detroit Renaissance) and the 5-foot-11 Hines (Macomb Dakota) enrolled at defending Catholic League champion St. Mary’s last summer and moved into the school’s dormitories. Initially, the Catholic League ruled the players ineligible back in August, prompting a separate lawsuit citing the state of Michigan’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act for the CHSL’s boarding-school eligibility protocol tied to language in its bylaws, which only bans immediate eligibility for boarding school transfers coming from the minorityheavy cities of Detroit and Lansing.
In December, the players’ families dropped the lawsuit against the CHSL when the CHSL agreed to lift the ban and Savoury and Hines played for the Eagles over the next two weeks. Then, on December 28, the MHSAA, which had originally ruled Savoury and Hines eligible, reversed course and ruled them ineligible for the rest of the season based on the fact that it didn’t consider St. Mary’s a boarding school (claiming the school failed meet a 10-percent boarding school enrollment requirement), despite St. Mary’s boarding students, both local and international, since the 1800s. Junior Angel Kechovski, an international student from Europe, was also deemed ineligible by the MHSAA.
Shortly after New Years, the Savoury and Hines families, along with Kechovski family, filed another lawsuit, this time naming the MHSAA as the defendant. Last week, St. Mary’s felt it had solved the problem by showing what they believed to be proof that the school did meet
the 10 percent boarding-school requirement and planned for eligibility to be granted to Savoury, Hines and Kechovski in time for them to suit up in last Tuesday night’s CHSL showdown versus Birmingham Brother Rice. But on Tuesday morning, the MHSAA informed St. Mary’s that the appeal it filed showing the boarding-school numbers was insufficient and the three student athletes were still ineligible for the remainder of the season.
St. Mary’s lost at home to Brother Rice 74-69 Tuesday. The Eaglets fell on the road to Novi Detroit Catholic Central 68-56 Friday night. Nationally ranked the past three years, St. Mary’s has struggled this winter amidst the transfer turmoil and following Friday’s defeat dropped to an 8-9 mark in the winloss column.