Evansville and Lake Mills: The Hypothetical Court Battle

In what I guess is becoming a running series of posts challenging the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association, this post will address a controversy that sprung up last weekend involving the regional championship basketball game between Evansville and Lake Mills.

Under the WIAA’s rules, Lake Mills earned the right to host the game because it had a higher seed than Evansville. That right, however, is not absolute and requires that Lake Mills’s gym have the ability to accommodate the anticipated crowd. Lake Mills’s gym only fits a little over a thousand fans–not near the amount of people interested in the attending the game–so let’s take a look at what could have happened if this off-the-court battle to determine which court would host the game ended up in court.

The WIAA rules lay out the process for moving a playoff basketball game. Specifically, the away team must sell all of its allotted tickets, be able to guarantee that additional tickets will be sold, and be told that additional tickets are not available from the hosting school. If these factors are met, “the game will be moved by the WIAA.” Evansville checked all of these boxes. And because the WIAA didn’t give itself any wiggle room–it used the word “will,” not “may”–it sure looks like the game should have been moved to a bigger gym.

But there is a wrinkle: the WIAA says that “no game will be moved after 12 noon on the day prior to it being played without both schools agreeing to the change.” Both Lake Mills and Evansville needed to win Friday night to even be eligible to play on Saturday, so we are in a weird spot given this timing requirement (I’m guessing that the WIAA didn’t even think of this issue when making the rules). In my mind, however, the best way to reconcile this situation would have been for the WIAA to have declared on Friday morning that the game would be moved if it ended up being a Lake Mills-Evansville matchup.

And let’s say a judge would agree with that reading of the WIAA’s rules. How can you force the WIAA to comply with its own rules? In this case, I think the best shot is to file a constitutional due process claim. The WIAA is probably a “state actor,” which means that it can’t take something away from someone “without due process of law.” Here, the argument would be that the WIAA is taking away rights that were granted to Evansville and its fans by the WIAA’s own rules.

So let’s go further and say that a judge both agrees with my interpretation of the WIAA rules and that the WIAA’s failure to follow its own rules constitutes a valid due process claim. We run into a couple of practical considerations that I think would ultimately be fatal to Evansville’s case. First, I don’t think it’s a good idea for a school or Evansville’s fans to be suing the WIAA over something as relatively trivial as this. Second, arguably no one had standing to file the suit until Evansville won on Friday and I’m not aware of any courthouses that are open on a Saturday to hear the case. Finally, even if you could get in front of a judge, it would probably be one from Jefferson County who would have to rely on voters from Lake Mills to get re-elected. Now, I would never imply that a judge would make a decision based on re-election prospects, but it certainly puts an interesting spin on the case.

In short, there was probably nothing Evansville could do about the WIAA decision, even though it appeared to be in the right. But who cares? Ultimately, Evansville won the “court” battle that mattered 80-73.

Based on the outcry over this case, I’m going to guess that the WIAA will be amending these rules for next year. One option would be to say that the WIAA may move a game at its discretion, which would give it leeway when making these sorts of decisions. Another option–and the one that would get my vote– would be that regional games will be played at the higher seed’s gym regardless of its size.