Religious exemptions for HS meets

What other religious exemptions/acceptions could teams get out of CIF officials?

I am going to say that there are Christians cultists out there who get off on applying drastic measures to stop descendants of/former Christians from doing anything not explicitly stated in the bible, like individualistic competitive running.

Uh huh

Chances are that a team running against no one, runs slower than the top teams in the real race. The exception would be if there were heavy rain or mud slowing down the real race.

Anyways, they won't make it - their top guy has broken 19 once. They have scorers running over 20 minutes.

Its got to suck to be a runner as an Adventist. Most the major invites are on saturdays. In college, it would be practically impossible - nearly all the meets are on saturdays. A coach isn't going to grant an exception to someone to miss the conference meet. There are probably a couple adventist colleges with teams though.

Generally I'm very supportive of accommodating religious convictions, and I even think there's a lot of merit to their Sabbath practices. But yes, there are lots of problems with turning championship racing into a patchwork setup where different teams could be conceivably permitted to run on all different days. It might as well then be a "virtual" competition, like what some marathons became during COVID -- but I've never heard anyone suggest this is an adequate substitute.

Has this been done in previous years? Obviously the state meet is itself on a Saturday, so the school must make exceptions sometimes (unless they're hoping they can run that the day before too?).

Were they to qualify, they'd beg to run that alone on Friday too. They make no exceptions - these guys are even stricter than the Mormons on doing nothing but worship on their holy day. They have a lot of other rules too.

Exactly how I feel. Their practices are worthy, but they simply don't make sense for competitive sports. And IIRC, the same thing was done last year.
Curious...if a team had a few--let's say four--7th Day Adventist members on it, could the team petition to run on a separate day or will the race admin only grant it if the school follows that doctrine? Seems like it could get really complicated and messy.

Adventists probably wouldn't join a sports team at public schools - too likely to interfere with their holy day and other requirements. If they did, they'd have to work something out with their coach probably. It would probably come down to they can be on the team, but get replaced by another runner for post season races on saturdays - though if they were very good, a coach might try to get some exception like this for them.

Its probably easy to grant when like this team, they don't have a shot in heck of going to state. I bet if they did make it though - the first team they displace could protest - and there would just be one extra team at state.

They are looking forward to Friday meets in NCAA.

Total nonsense.

In the end of the world prophecy in revelation in the new testament, The wh*r3 riding the 7 headed dragon is obviously the 7 man XC using a wh*r3 for motivation./s

* 7-headed dragon = 7 man XC team/s

Not trying to dump on Christians here, just curious how far religious accommodations can or will go.

Ridiculous.

Why was this never an issue for this team- or any team-before?

Where does this end?

reasonable accomodation. They wouldn't let a ball sport team play against nobody - but they might schedule a friday game for them and modify a bracket to support

Why do we give these morons in a cult any say what-so-ever? If you want to be in some lunatic cult, then accept the consequences of your stupidity and don’t try to make the world accommodate your dumb decisions.

There are plenty of places to dump on Christians. I'm trying to focus on the fairness of accommodations in athletics.

so how does that work with the timing company, the meet officials, lead gator guy, guy at gate collecting admission $$ for spectators?

I’m just pointing out that we shouldn’t accommodate delusional freaks. It’s the only fair thing to do.