It’s bad enough when the world at large lionizes sports so much that schools are willing to cheat to win. It’s reprehensible and totally unacceptable when ‘Christian’ schools do it.
Grace Christian Academy’s athletic program has been penalized for using an ineligible football and basketball player who was receiving financial aid for tuition from the pastor at Grace Baptist Church.
What would possess a school to do such a thing? And a Christian school at that?
Grace Christian Principal Randy Down, who has served as interim athletic director since last year, said the school administration didn’t know it was breaking TSSAA rules. “Since this was one isolated incident and this action was one of ignorance and not disregarding the rule, we feel strongly about the many student-athletes at GCA who have adhered to TSSAA rules,” Down said. “We feel that the penalties from the TSSAA are unusually harsh. Grace Christian Academy will be appealing the severity and duration of this ruling on behalf of our families and their students.”
Ignorance of the law is no excuse. And neither is ignorance of easily discoverable sports rules. And defending the behavior instead of apologizing for it is the wrong route to take. ‘We didn’t do it and if we did it we didn’t mean to do it’ is the same sort of thing someone pulled over for speeding says. But that never gets them out of being responsible for having sped.
Williams was a freshman at Karns High School in the fall of 2006 when his single mother was killed in an automobile accident, and he went to live with his grandparents. Down said Ron Stewart, pastor at Grace Baptist Church, saw that Williams was in emotional distress and reached out to help him. And when it became apparent Williams’ grandparents couldn’t afford tuition for Grace Christian in fall of 2007, the pastor and church helped provide for the tuition.
That’s sad- to be sure. But one can’t help wondering if the many disadvantaged young people in Knoxville who don’t play sports would have been shown, or have been shown, the same consideration. How many kids, whose parents have been killed, who can’t throw a ball have been given the same opportunities for a free education at GCA?
Athletics in our society is a religion. Making Christianity complicit in the practice of that religion at the expense of ethics is not something that should happen.
As an aside, the kids who play sports at our county schools have told me over the years that the most unchristian team they ever play is when they play GCA. The kids from GCA cuss at other teams and flagrantly foul and behave badly considerably more than the public school kids that the local kids play. It’s quite astonishing that oftentimes public school kids are more Christian than Christian school kids. But perhaps there’s an environment of ‘we must win at any cost’ at GCA that needs to be examined. From within.
Zwinglius Redivivus 