Right to Play: Irony Thick as Thieves

Proposed bill highlights clash between parties of Illinois administrative state

Springfield, home of the Illinois state legislature, is where our elected officials discuss and debate policy and, in turn, enact laws.

Allow me to make a live edit to the lede graph: a supermajority in both the House and Senate rarely allows for productive ‘debate.’ Actions become laws under the disguise of democratic practice and we are left with one party gobbling up power like Ms. Pacman inside a 1983 gaming arcade.

As we roll into the outdoor season of play, an emerging issue around the state is stirring up the masses and pitting Illinois central planners against each other.

In March, a House committee advanced a piece of legislation called the “Right to Play Act.” First introduced in February by State Rep. Janet Yang Rohr (D-Naperville), the legislation would allow high school athletes to participate for their club team and high school team in the same season. Currently, the Illinois High School Association has a rule against such an arrangement.

This particular bill (HB3037) is non-partisan, drawing interest from reps on both sides of the aisle. It should come as no surprise that the majority of co-sponsors are from Chicagoland districts where travel sports dominate. A general rule for suburban politicians: do not get in the way of parents and their right to spend gobs of money on their children’s youth sports teams. If so, they’ll elect someone next cycle who won’t.

A recent hearing in Springfield saw bill sponsors trot out high school athletes who gave compelling testimony. Their declaration: regardless of sport—volleyball, soccer, cross-country, etc.—why should we be ordered to choose between our high school and club teams? If we can do both, let us do both. Stay out of our business, IHSA (more on them later). The athletes do make a reasonable argument about how enjoying the high school experience while simultaneously preparing for the next phase of life does not have to be mutually exclusive. For some, they can occur on parallel tracks.

This line of reasoning has assuredly opened old wounds between high school and club coaches.

Around the turn of the century (or a little before), the private training industry started to gain a foothold in the youth market. Who held rightful meritocracy over the young athlete would seep into conversations I’d have with private and public coaches (the private guys were fine going on the record. The high school coaches almost always preferred to be off the record when criticizing club coaches). Here’s how those conversations would typically go: the private guys claimed they were better at individual skills and preparing players for whatever the “next level” was. Public school coaches said they were educators first who taught the kids how to play within a team concept. They, the high school ones, weren’t in it “for the money” and had the kids’ best interests at heart. The travel ones were there, they said, to bridge the developmental gap left over from the high school season. Both arguments have merit. I believe more options are beneficial to the consumer and it’s consumer demand—parents, kids—that drives the billion-dollar youth sports industry.

The dichotomy of mission between both parties—individual vs. team—means conflict is inevitable. High school coaches are tasked with building camaraderie and winning games within a pre-determined timeframe on the calendar. Private travel organizations aren’t subsidized by the state, market their services to the same talent pool and aren’t bound by geographical or seasonal restrictions. It’s easy to understand why a high school coach (from a public school, certainly) would see HB3037 as a threat. It’s easy to understand how a travel organization sees the legislation as an opportunity to expand its customer base.

You know what else is easy? To spot the tainted irony amongst all parties involved.

Let’s start with the IHSA.

Its leadership doesn’t want any part of this controversy, avoiding the Springfield hearing like the plague. A statement from the IHSA in opposition to the bill communicates its mission as “education-based athletics” and contained perfunctory corporate platitudes about “mentorship, community and academic responsibility” while drawing a line in the sand against what it sees as an adversarial private market by claiming, “travel sports has its merits but their end goal is very different.”

The statement included a section attributed to IHSA Executive Director Craig Anderson, lamenting the “trickle down from collegiate NIL” and warned of overuse injuries and other “untended consequences” if the bill was passed. Anderson also claimed the bill would “tax families’ time and finances” and in closing, reminded us all of the IHSA’s little engine that could status as a “non-profit” that should be left alone from the long arm of lawmakers and self-govern as it so capably has for over 100 years.

Among the IHSA’s many advisory committees is Sports Medicine. Someone might want to recommend a doctor for Anderson to scan for amnesia.

Any claim of self-governance lost credibility five years ago. Thousands of athletes across the state never got to complete seasons or compete for entire seasons when Anderson and the IHSA advisory board allowed themselves to be bullied by Governor Fatso and his Covid Industrial Complex. When the IHSA talks of “tangible results” as it relates to “competing for championships” and “character development of young people” what about the kids—and coaches—who got a raw deal in 2020 and 2021? All they got were muzzled faces, arm jabs, and contact trace slips (remember them? Good times!) So, please. Spare us the disingenuous comments about “unintended consequences.”

As for the politicians…they can smell a prudent cause when they see one.

“Right to Play” hits all the marks: constituency impact, populist advocacy, and bulletproof public relations. Heritage media outlets around Chicagoland gleefully lap up the talking points without raising any stink about the hypocrisy of it all. All they want are sound bites from victimized high school students.

It’s nice of Rep. Rohr to talk about her soccer-playing daughter and invite other young female athletes to speak in Springfield. Did she do the same in 2021? Where was her “do right by the kids” activist gene then?

On the subject of unintended consequences (or amusement, depending on your worldview), "Right to Play” provides a regional case study within our larger, national cultural and political climate.

As a country, we are moving away from a government-centric state. As we are witnessing in Washington, the man in charge does not like bureaucracy. Got an idea? Come to the White House or Mar-a-Lago, and we’ll talk. Sounds good? Let’s do it! This entrepreneurial-based decision-making process is the opposite of how government works—let’s form a committee, get stakeholders involved, blah, blah. The climate in Washington right now is not to wait for everything to be perfect but rather to shoot before aiming.

We’re seeing this same clash of ideals over “Right to Play.” The proposed bill is a marketplace-driven outcome to overgovernance. Incongruous are the positions of the parties involved. The politicians are the free market advocates, while the IHSA carries the flag for the ruling class.

That’s why it’s best to be suspicious, as the irony of that dynamic is thick as thieves.

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