Due to real life commitments I have not been able to do my “Rant of the Day” post in the last couple of days. However, I am coming back with a story that is going to make your head spin. Here is the basic outline: a female volley ball player in high school gets a phone call from a friend who has had too much to drink to then drive. She goes and gets said friend, takes her home. Her reward? The school suspends her for five games!
You can read the entire story on ESPN, but all I can say about this is… WOW!
Believe it or not, all of this gets better as the parents of the student-athlete filed a lawsuit to have the school’s decision overturned, only to be told that the court has no jurisdiction over the matter.
Again I say… WOW!
Since this is a high school, let’s keep it in prospective and say: “What have we learned from this?” That in the eyes of the officials of the North Andover (Mass.) High School it is best if you leave your drunken friend be, and maybe allow them to get behind the wheel of their own vehicle, than to go and pick them up. Or to be brutally honest, in the mind of the people running the school it would have been right to leave a drunken girl to her own means than to do what this volleyball player did.
I wonder where MADD (Mothers against Drunk Driving) and all of those associations are in that area of Massachusetts, and why they have not chimed in. Time to step it up and to stand behind a pair of teenagers that did the right thing! Cause the drunk girl did the right thing in calling someone instead of driving and the other girl did the right thing by going to pick her up instead of letting her be!
In an environment like a school, where young men and women go to learn and become better people, is this the example that we want to give to them? Because if that is the case then people should not expect that the next generation “do the right thing”, when it’s pretty evident the current one isn’t.
But even more frightening in this bizarre event is this… in a country where we talk about checks and balances, where we are taught that no one is above the law, a high school can not be sued for its actions against a student?
How many times have we heard “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk?”
How many times have we read/heard about yet another teenager killed due to alcohol?
But that all goes by the waist side as the school wanted to prove some sort of a point, on what (unless the author of the article omitted it) was not a school function.
I know that many people within the school systems are not fans or supporters of athletics, witnessed it myself when in high school, have heard about it from many others throughout the years. And this story sounds a lot like another incident of that happening once again.
Not buying the zero tolerance against alcohol that the school board is talking about, what I am seeing is people who might not have a vested interest in sports at the school finding a way to get one over on the players.
I just have to wonder, had this been an all-state quarterback, maybe just before the “big game”, or the son/daughter of someone on the board of this fine institution would the zero tolerance rule had been in effect? I can never prove it one way or the other, but if I had to guess, if it had been either of the two above mentioned no stories would have been written, since no action would have been taken.
I hope that this volleyball player is placed back on the team and the school is made to apologize to her publicly! Will it happen? Only time will tell, but whether or not she gets an apologize from the school this young woman should be praised by one and all for doing the right thing!
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