Good intentions are necessary, but by themselves not sufficient for wise decisions. That was evident recently on newspaper sports pages that featured a story about Wisconsin’s ban on “disrespectful” behavior at high school games. The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association’s ban on speech intended to taunt opponents is not new. But it became infamous in December 2015, when the Association reminded member schools to prohibit booing and sarcastic chants, such as “Air Ball” when a basketball shot misses the basket entirely and “Warm up the Bus” when a score is lopsided. The ban became national news after a female basketball player lobbed a profane tweet at the Association that went viral.
News coverage of this story has emphasized the crude tweet, which got its author suspended for five games, and the reactions of professional athletes, who found it overprotective and silly. To date, I have read no legal commentary on the subject.
Perhaps that’s because the law is murky here. The Association is nominally private, but most of its member schools are public. If a court found that the Association is entwined with the state in its structure and operations, the court could deem it a “state actor,” making the ban subject to a challenge on free speech grounds.
The Association would likely respond that the ban prevents potential disruptions of games by threatening or violent behavior resulting from the taunts. To be sure, the Supreme Court has upheld punishment of students whose speech was sexually provocative or appeared to endorse drug use. But whether the taunts common to, say, high school basketball games, have the same disruptive potential as those types of speech is open to debate.
Legalities aside though, common sense should prevail. All states should prohibit cheers or chants that are racist, sexist, sexual, or demeaning to an opponent’s personal appearance or economic status. And the athlete who fired off the profane tweet was properly punished, because kids must learn to discuss legitimate concerns in a mature way. But educators shouldn’t try to bleach the competitive atmosphere out of inherently competitive events. Playing away from home should be challenging, because by the time kids reach high school, they should be challenged, in the classroom and in athletics. To paraphrase one journalist, the Wisconsin rule is an air ball, so let’s warm up the bus and move on.
