CIF Is Fair Game : Prep Governing Body Spending More Time in Courtroom

Sixteen years ago, Ken Fagans expressed concern over the amount of time the California Interscholastic Federation, the governing body of high school sports in the state, was spending in court.

Fagans was then commissioner of the Southern Section, the largest of the 10 sections that make up the CIF, and the federation had been to court 3 times in 2 years.

At the time, Fagans said he feared that the growth of litigation would undermine the CIF’s power to rule over its member schools. “This threatens us,” he was quoted as saying in a 1972 article.

Times have changed. CIF Commissioner Thomas Byrnes recalled the day last school year in which three attorneys flew to different parts of the state to represent the federation in court.

Sitting in his Fullerton office, Byrnes can reach behind his desk and produce reams of paper representing some 30 cases filed in the past year. He indicated that the number was representative of the CIF’s caseload the last few years.

In the pile is the court injunction that allowed the Pasadena Muir boys’ basketball team into the 1988 playoffs, even though the team had forfeited several games for using an ineligible player.

A $30-million suit filed on behalf of another Muir player claimed that his chances for a college scholarship would be hurt if the team could not play in postseason games. The player was a reserve, but just the same, Muir got an injunction and a berth in the playoffs.

Said Stan Thomas, commissioner of the Southern Section, of which Muir is a member: “(Increasingly), the courts are doing our business.”

The CIF is facing a growing number of challenges in court, mostly from individuals who claim that the CIF’s rules are unfair or vague. The CIF, in turn, says its rules are repeatedly upheld in court, but it still expresses concern over where this increased litigation will lead.

According to Byrnes, the CIF wins about 95% of the cases that do go to court. But he added that the federation often decides to adjust penalties to schools in cases that the CIF thinks it might lose in court--even if the CIF believes there has been a clear violation of its rules.

“You pick your fights,” Thomas said.

CIF officials are encouraged now that some individuals who have decided to take the CIF to court without first going through the federation’s appeal process are being directed back to the organization.

“The courts will say, ‘Does the organization have an appeal process?’ And ours is well-defined,” said Dean Crowley, associate commissioner of the Southern Section. “They will then tell them to go back.”

Said Bruce Keuning, president of the CIF’s executive committee: “(My biggest concern) is the rules will no longer have the effect they’re intended to have if we have rules that can be overthrown by a swift gavel.”

Before 1982, each section budgeted for its own legal expenses. But as court cases increased, the CIF decided to handle all legal matters, figuring that a challenge to one of the sections was a challenge to the federation as a whole. In 1982, the CIF budgeted $54,000 for legal fees. This school year, the figure is $80,000, a 48% increase.

The CIF, established in 1913, organizes playoffs, arranges for championship sites and sets up the rules that state high schools abide by to create “equity in competition.”

But having made the rules, it also must enforce them.

If a school uses an ineligible player, by far the most common infraction, the section often will recommend that the school forfeit games. If a school refuses to follow the recommendation, the sections have the power to exclude it from playoffs or, more severely, revoke the school’s membership in the organization, in effect killing its athletic program.

“When the Southern Section recommends something, I think a school should listen,” Thomas said.

But increasingly, when the sections make recommendations, people are running to court.

Schools, however, rarely take the sections to court. It’s usually the parents of athletes.

“The stakes are so much higher now,” said Ray Alvarado, an attorney in Orange who has represented clients in three cases involving the Southern Section. “You think about the increasing cost of college, that a scholarship is worth $40,000, $50,000.”

Ineligible athletes can’t be scouted for scholarships, so many of the suits brought against the CIF are not for money but for playing time.

“Money is seldom the issue,” Thomas said. “They’re looking for an injunction.”

Said Byrnes: “We’re merely part of a litigious society. If you were to ask the city of Fullerton if they’ve had more lawsuits in the past 10 to 15 years, the answer would be quite a bit more.”

Still others believe that the CIF and its sections bring much of this upon themselves.

John Duncan is the superintendent of the Simi Valley Unified School District. Last year, the Southern Section learned that Royal High School in Simi Valley had used an ineligible player in winning a Southern Section boys’ soccer championship.

Usually in such a case, the Southern Section would strip the championship from the school. But in this case, it determined that the fault did not lie with the player but with Royal’s administration. Southern Section officials recommended that Glenn Lipman be relieved of his duties as athletic director.

Duncan was outraged. He and the Simi Valley school board threatened legal action.

“They are totally out of their purview when they begin to dictate how we handle personnel, saying who we should hire and who we should fire,” Duncan said at a March meeting of the school board.

The CIF, however, did not back down, and Lipman resigned. Duncan says that he did not pressure Lipman to quit and that the board was ready to go to court to fight for him. Lipman, now the athletic director at Channel Islands High in Oxnard, refused to discuss the matter.

Duncan said: “If he would not have stepped down, we would have taken action. Litigation and high schools bothers me, too. But I’ve been in high school administration 30 years. I frankly do not remember the CIF taking the kind of position they are taking today. Maybe the problems they deal with have changed, but maybe their approach to the problems has, too.”

Apparently, it has. Officials of the Southern Section and CIF say they don’t want to punish students for front-office errors. So, in recent years, they have taken action against the individuals they believe are responsible for mistakes.

After a hearing on a charge that a football-basketball player at Santa Ana’s Mater Dei High was recruited last spring, the Southern Section recommended that an administrator it thought had acted improperly be excluded from any contact with the athletic program, rather than penalize the athlete or teams.

Critics may question the section’s right to recommend such moves, yet no one has come up with an easy solution to the problem the sections face when handing out penalties. If they should not penalize administrators and don’t want to penalize the student-athletes, whom do they penalize?

“At one point, we were hurting the kids, and it was the coach or the administrator who (committed the infraction),” said Andrew W. Patterson, whose West Covina law firm represents the CIF. “You zero in on the wrongdoer and take some action, and then you get complaints that the CIF is muscling in and the CIF is a bad guy and they’re overstepping their bounds. I guess the courts will eventually tell us where our boundaries are.”

More than 75 years after its inception, the CIF is still trying to define its powers and jurisdiction. Those powers are spelled out in its rule book, called the Blue Book, which is modified slightly for each section. The CIF and the sections think the book and its rules are clear. But critics, nearly every time they take the sections to court, say the book is vague.

Thomas acknowledges that the rules are written “so we have certain latitude.”

But Hal Harkness, City Section commissioner, warned in September: “The rules need to be more clear and precise.”

The rule book is written by high school principals. Certain rules, including the one concerning recruiting, are being rewritten in more precise language by Patterson.

The book is “the only thing we have to protect us in a court of law,” Thomas said last December.

So the CIF and its sections guard their rules the way parents protect their children. Many times, the two directly conflict.

Consider Gabriel Boettcher. He turned 19 on June 2, 1987, 3 months before the start of his senior year at Fullerton High School. Boettcher, who had competed in football, soccer, water polo, swimming and wrestling, was ineligible as a senior under CIF rules, which forbid anyone whose 19th birthday falls before Sept. 1 to participate in interscholastic sports.

Boettcher and his father, Harvey Boettcher, argued that because of extenuating circumstances, Gabriel should have been granted extended eligibility. They argued that he didn’t begin his formal education until he was 8--having been born and reared in Liberia--and once he was in school, it was discovered that he had dyslexia, a learning disorder.

When the Southern Section expressed concern over Boettcher’s size--6 feet 2 inches tall, 195 pounds--and the legal implications if he should injure someone, the Boettchers offered to have Gabriel participate in noncontact sports, such as tennis and swimming.

The Boettchers appealed to the Southern Section the summer before his senior year. After about 5 months of appeals to the Southern Section and the CIF, they were turned down.

Keuning, superintendent of the Bellflower Christian Schools, chaired one committee that decided against Boettcher’s eligibility.

“I think if we would have let our emotions vote that day, it would have been a unanimous vote to let the kid play,” Keuning said.

“But you open the door for one exception and you’d be amazed. The next day you’ll have another one who, in his mind, thinks he has just as much right to be an exception. If you start making all these exceptions because of emotions, your rules are going to have to change.”

But Keith Gregory, a Newport Beach attorney who represented Demetrius Jones, a former Calabasas High football player whose case was similar to Boettcher’s, believes the hard-line approach invites still more litigation.

“You can’t just look at the black and the white,” Gregory said. “There are always gray areas, exceptions. But they refuse to see that. When you apply the rules as hard and fast as they do, you’re bound to find yourself in court.”

Gregory succeeded in getting Jones’ eligibility reinstated through the courts. The CIF eventually won its case on appeal, but by that time, Jones had already graduated.

Gabriel Boettcher, who lost his last appeal in November, 1987, didn’t participate in sports his senior year. Instead, “he partied a lot,” according to his father, gained 40 pounds and went from a B student to a D student. Looking back on the matter, Harvey Boettcher said he regrets appealing to the CIF.

“I wished I would have taken them to court,” he said.

Thomas says the CIF sometimes must look beyond the individual’s circumstances.

“The kid was not the issue, the rule was the issue,” Thomas said.

Out of all this, Patterson sees a broader issue.

“When it comes down to it, what we’re really talking about here is sports,” he said. “A high school game . . .

“From the point of view of the student and the parents, I agree, it’s the most pressing question in their life. But in a broad social sense, we’ve got freeways to maintain, biology books to be bought and biology teachers to be paid. How much out of the pie do they want, and how much procedure does society want?”

Ken Fagans asked himself those same questions 16 years ago.

Times staff writer John Lynch contributed to this story.