I'll say one thing for this magazine, interspersed between all of the hero-worship articles are some that cover subjects with real meat. In the last few issues are articles about foreign swimmers with American college scholarships, the conflict between USS and high-school swimming, eating disorders among swimmers, and (the lack of) racial diversity in the sport.
These are real issues to the sport.
Wouldn't it be nice if this group discussed some of these?
Well if anyone is interested, we had our appeal before the Missouri Appellate court on Wednesday. The average time before a ruling is handed down is one month. It was interesting and from watching the cases before ours, it was apparent that the appeal process is more or less open season for the judges on the lawyers. They get into their argument about 2 minutes before one of the judges interrupts and starts firing pointed questions. Our lawyer went first and it took a while to get what we are looking for straight. We want our daughter to practice with the school team but to also be able to practice with the USA-S team when she has time, especially when she does not have HS practice on the same day. We finally got around to our legal attack, that is, that the rules have no reasonable basis because they treat seemingly identical situations different. The rules differentiate between students who want to do the same sport both in school and out-of-school and student who want to do different sports in the same situation. Luckily, we had in the trial record the case of an athlete, Kristen Foulk, who is a star volleyball and basketball player and who graduated from the same school my daughter attends. She went on to Stanford, played both sports there and I believe made the Olympic Volleyball team. She is now in the WNBA. We had demonstrated that the rules allowed her to practice one sport with the high school team and then practice with the out-of-school team until the sun came up the next day under the current rules. With that background, this biased observer believes that the court gave the lawyer for the state a pretty hard time when they asked for a rational basis for the rule. The judges tried for about 10 (of the allotted 15) minutes to get it out of the lawyer but he kept on giving really poor answers or giving the court a history lesson. In the first case, he tried to claim that the rule prevented conflicts between the in and out-of-school coaches. The judge simply asked why there would be any different between those situations for which the lawyer had no answer. At one point one of the judges interrupted and said that “you have spent the last two minutes telling us that you have always done it this way, please tell us your rational basis”. Later, a second judge interrupted and asked, with apologies to the first judge, for permission to rephrase the original question and asked for the state’s best rational basis. At this point, the lawyer reiterated the list that had already been belabored and really didn’t offer a good answer. There was some confusion about some technicalities and I hope that they don’t get in the way. At least we were able to get the court to accept our assertion that the rules must be drawn from a rational basis and implemented fairly. We will have to wait to see how strong the basis needs to be.
Well if anyone is interested, we had our appeal before the Missouri Appellate court on Wednesday. The average time before a ruling is handed down is one month. It was interesting and from watching the cases before ours, it was apparent that the appeal process is more or less open season for the judges on the lawyers. They get into their argument about 2 minutes before one of the judges interrupts and starts firing pointed questions. Our lawyer went first and it took a while to get what we are looking for straight. We want our daughter to practice with the school team but to also be able to practice with the USA-S team when she has time, especially when she does not have HS practice on the same day. We finally got around to our legal attack, that is, that the rules have no reasonable basis because they treat seemingly identical situations different. The rules differentiate between students who want to do the same sport both in school and out-of-school and student who want to do different sports in the same situation. Luckily, we had in the trial record the case of an athlete, Kristen Foulk, who is a star volleyball and basketball player and who graduated from the same school my daughter attends. She went on to Stanford, played both sports there and I believe made the Olympic Volleyball team. She is now in the WNBA. We had demonstrated that the rules allowed her to practice one sport with the high school team and then practice with the out-of-school team until the sun came up the next day under the current rules. With that background, this biased observer believes that the court gave the lawyer for the state a pretty hard time when they asked for a rational basis for the rule. The judges tried for about 10 (of the allotted 15) minutes to get it out of the lawyer but he kept on giving really poor answers or giving the court a history lesson. In the first case, he tried to claim that the rule prevented conflicts between the in and out-of-school coaches. The judge simply asked why there would be any different between those situations for which the lawyer had no answer. At one point one of the judges interrupted and said that “you have spent the last two minutes telling us that you have always done it this way, please tell us your rational basis”. Later, a second judge interrupted and asked, with apologies to the first judge, for permission to rephrase the original question and asked for the state’s best rational basis. At this point, the lawyer reiterated the list that had already been belabored and really didn’t offer a good answer. There was some confusion about some technicalities and I hope that they don’t get in the way. At least we were able to get the court to accept our assertion that the rules must be drawn from a rational basis and implemented fairly. We will have to wait to see how strong the basis needs to be.
