Hey, WIAA: “You Can’t Do That!”

There’s been an uproar over a recent request by the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association that schools ramp up efforts to stop what it considers unsportsmanlike chants from the crowd. Examples include taunts like “Airball,” “You can’t do that,” “Fundamentals,” and “Scoreboard.” This paternalistic approach from the WIAA has been skewered all over the internet and in Albany where I help coach the varsity boys basketball team, we spent a few minutes at practice the other day making fun of this proposal. But while it’s clear that the WIAA’s attempt to protect kids’ feelings is probably a bad idea, I haven’t seen anyone answer the question of whether the WIAA and its member schools actually have the authority to police these types of chants from the crowd in the first place.

To get that answer, we have to look to the First Amendment which guarantees all of us the freedom of speech. The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently held, starting with its decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District from 1969, that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” That, however, doesn’t mean that students can say whatever they want.

To determine whether a school can police a specific type of speech, we generally have to look at three considerations. First, we have to determine whether the speech is likely to cause a disruption. Second, we have to figure out whether the speech would be considered offensive to the community. The final consideration is whether the speech would be contrary to the basic educational mission of the school.

The cases that have applied these considerations are, in my mind, pretty hilarious. For example, a school was allowed to suspend a student for this speech to the student body because it was offensive:

I know a man who is firm – he’s firm in his pants, he’s firm in his shirt, his character is firm – but most of all, his belief in you the students of Bethel, is firm. Jeff Kuhlman is a man who takes his point and pounds it in. If necessary, he’ll take an issue and nail it to the wall. He doesn’t attack things in spurts – he drives hard, pushing and pushing until finally – he succeeds. Jeff is a man who will go to the very end – even the climax, for each and every one of you. So please vote for Jeff Kuhlman, as he’ll never come [long pause] between us and the best our school can be. He is firm enough to give it everything.

More recently, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a school could punish a student for holding up a “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS” banner because it undermines the school’s mission to curb illegal drug use.

So what about prohibiting students from chanting things like “season’s over” or “airball?” I’ve been to a lot of high school basketball games and I’ve never seen one disrupted by a chant, so there’s nothing to grab onto there (doing it in class would obviously be a different story). The same thing goes for whether the language is offensive. As someone who’s airballed a shot and heard about it from the crowd, it’s not the greatest feeling in the world, but I don’t think you can reasonably call it offensive.

That leaves the issue of whether allowing these chants is contrary to the educational mission of the school districts. In the BONG HiTS 4 JESUS case, there is a fairly clear interest from the school’s perspective not to promote drug use. Here, we’re dealing with something much more vague, something along the lines of “we want students to be nice to other people.” If this is indeed the rationale, then schools are opening themselves up to all sorts of slippery slope issues: Is a teacher mean when she fails a student? What about a player who criticizes another for not making a tackle he should have made? And what about that idea that schools should be teaching students to deal with adversity, not run away from or prohibit it?

Long story, short, my guess is that even if the WIAA and its member schools wanted to ban these types of chants, they probably couldn’t constitutionally do it. So worry not fans, you’ll still be able to serenade your rival with “na na na na, na na na na, hey, hey, hey, goodbye” when you knock them out of the playoffs.