Interesting story here where the entire Northville team was DQ'd for mismatching undershirts.
I'm not entirely opposed to enforcing the uniform rule, but at the very least shouldn't only 6 of the 7 runners be DQ'd? Can't you say Northville's #1, who would have qualified individually for the state finals, was the only one wearing the "correct" undershirt and everyone else was not in compliance?
Feel bad for the kids to have your season end this way.
That is really really bad. I feel for the team, it would make more sense to just disqualify the two offending runners, but then it is a team event. We don't let stuff like this happen in other sports.
It's on the coach. They should know the rules.
Did the boys wear Bun shorts?
YMMV wrote:
It's on the coach. They should know the rules.
The officials ignored the actual rule. The rule requires a warning before DQ. Instead, after the race was over they retroactively DQed the whole team when no warning had been given.
Typical petty bogus rule enforcement by HS officials. The officials and whoever complained should all be ashamed.
The lesson the kids learn from participating in XC: The system arbitrarily enforces rules to screw people.
The mismatched undershirts clearly gave them a competitive advantage.
Not only was the team allowed to start with no incident, but another team was also wearing mismatched shirts and they were not penalized at all. It may looks a little bit sloppy, but it confers no competitive advantage.
Whoever the head official was on this should have shut this down immediately because it was a total non-factor. More than likely the officials were trying to justify this as a learning experience, but the only thing any of those kids learned was that old people can be total aholes for the most trivial of reasons.
I just never understand these silly uniform disqualifications. Who are we protecting? What advantage is being given?
This is so silly.