So they played a football playoff game Friday night in Skaneateles. This in itself was rather extraordinary, given the dim history of the Lakers program for nearly two decades before Tim Green took over as head coach in 2010.
By any conceivable standard, the night should have served as a celebration, a last chance for the home folks to salute a group of determined, hard-working young men who put together an undefeated regular season and aspire to earn Section III and state championships.
Instead, the whole thing has turned contentious and ugly. Accusations of recruiting, questions of eligibility and residence, a school board conducting a long investigation and releasing a weighty report, tempers flaring at board meetings – even this publication was attacked when it stepped into the fray.
Wherever you look in this whole saga, a common theme keeps emerging. Adults, even with the best of intentions, act out of line, and by doing so obscure the accomplishments of the kids, which should matter the most.
This, of course, is nothing new in sports. We hear of Little League baseball parents screaming at 10-year olds, Pop Warner football parents imploring hard hits on children not equipped to take them, peewee hockey parents brawling, and all of the above berating officials.
It turns out, though, that in high school sports those same themes take hold – or at least it has in Skaneateles, where all sorts of figures, none of them wearing helmets, shoulder pads or cleats, have assumed the stage for themselves, to the detriment of everyone.
Start with Tim Green and his fellow coaches. Once hired, they set out to bring winning football back to Skaneateles, and no one really had qualms with that quest. But the sheer intensity of their quest led to the perception, fair or not, that they cut all kinds of corners and may have pushed the players too hard.
As we all know, perception can harden into reality, wild rumor can be discussed as if it were established fact, and within a short amount of time the accusations can really fly – which they did, and they became too numerous for authority figures to completely ignore.
Enter the Skaneateles school board, who was compelled to investigate the transfer of a handful of players into the district and whether those moves amounted to recruiting, a direct violation of Section III rules. And that only added to the problems.
Understand, the school board had every right to look into this, and should have done so. It’s important to make sure that every single person participating in high school athletics is eligible, so that teams don’t have to forfeit games they won on the field.
Yet it didn’t help matters that the investigation dragged out for months, only adding to the air of suspicion and hostility. Attorneys on all ends, threatening all sorts of legal action, enjoyed acting litigious, but no else did.
All this led to the Oct. 4 board meeting, where community members and parents added their angry voices to the maelstrom. That led to my colleague Jason Emerson’s column in our own Skaneateles Press, which either was an act of editorial courage or a blatant smear job, depending on who you asked. Either way, it only fanned the flames.
Notice a theme here? Every single adult that waded into this fray only seemed to make it worse, even if they wanted to make it better. And in the process, the players have receded further into the shadows, their voices silenced, their feats unnoticed, if not unacknowledged.
That is the real sad part of all this. Though Skaneateles is allowed to continue into the sectional playoffs (and perhaps beyond), they take the journey with a large shadow cast over them, and outsiders paying far more than casual attention to their progress.
The Lakers’ ultimate result is guaranteed to be cast in a harsh light. If they win, cynics will say they bent or broke the rules, so it can’t be respected. If they lose, those same cynics will gloat about it and consider it some form of poetic justice.
Perhaps it’s all calmed down now. Perhaps an unspeakable tragedy, the death of a Phoenix football player (Ridge Barden) on the field at Homer, sobered everyone and put things back in perspective, and if so, it’s even sadder that it took a tragedy for normality to return.
Whichever side you take in this long and frustrating affair, at least now these players at Skaneateles have the chance to play and pursue their ultimate goals. It is their game, after all. Sometimes the adults, all the adults, have to remember that basic point.
