09.11.2024

Boston tax crisis looms | Josh Kraft earns a vote | Petty politics, cronyism behind cannabis chief’s ouster | Bureaucracy run amok in high school sports | Quick hits |

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Cruel bureaucracy: High school football player who made a comeback after his leg was crushed in an accident told by MIAA he can’t play his senior year

Michael Bailey was seated on a curb and waiting for a ride on the night of July 4th, 2021, having spent the holiday on the Cape celebrating a friend’s birthday.

That’s when a darkened truck out of nowhere ran over high school football player’s extended legs, shattering several bones.

Bailey was rushed from Harwich to a medical center in Boston, where he underwent several surgeries and was forced to sit out the season and repeat a grade.

However, Bailey not only recovered, he went on to become a standout on Arlington Catholic’s varsity football team both in his enthusiasm and his ability to play a number of different positions.

By any reasonable standard, the parochial school and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, which determines eligibility to play, should both be lauding Bailey as a remarkable comeback story.

Instead, Dan Shine, the school’s athletic director, in a letter to Bailey’s parents, cited MIAA rules to put a premature end to the young player’s high school football days just as he prepared to enter his senior year.

And in Arlington Catholic’s application of those standards, it’s hard to see anything reasonable or fair.

Michael Bailey had high hopes for his senior year - now he’s told he can’t play.

A board member of the MIAA himself, Shine cited the rules that bar so-called “fifth year” students from taking part in athletics, that is, except for those who repeat a year due to failing grades.

Bailey, who struggled with dyslexia and attention deficit issues, would clearly seem to fit that definition, having barely passed most of his classes his freshman year while flunking biology.

Laid up in the hospital after his accident, Bailey, at that time a student at Catholic Memorial, was unable to retake biology that summer.

Bailey had decided to transfer to the now defunct Cambridge Matignon School, which, based on his academic performance, required him to repeat his freshman year.

Shine, the Arlington Catholic athletic chief and MIAA board member, acknowledges this in his letter to Bailey’s parents that was reviewed by Contrarian Boston.

But then Shine pulls out his trump card, justifying the decision to block the 18-year-old rising senior from playing football with a reason only a bean counting bureaucrat could love.

While Bailey and his parents made a “sound decision” to repeat his freshman year at Matignon, if he had stayed at Catholic Memorial, the school would have let him advance to the next grade, abysmal grades and all.

The letter from Arlington Catholic’s athletic chief arrived at Bailey’s home in late June and came as a complete shock.

To add to their befuddlement, his parents were told their son, as he starts his senior year, has just about all the credits he needs to graduate.

For Michael, who has struggled academically, athletics have been a godsend, being forced onto the sidelines during his senior year is a devastating blow, his mother explained to us.

“Are you kidding me?” Michael’s mother, Michelle Walsh Bailey, tells Contrarian Boston, of her reaction after receiving the letter. “You are going to make this kid go to school for another year for one credit and not be able to play. It’s just cruel.”

In making his decision, Shine, the Arlington Catholic athletic director, wrote that he had conferred with top officials at the MIAA, which, of course, he helps oversee as a board member.

Maybe he should have consulted a little further with his fellow bigwigs at the MIAA.

Here’s what really happened: Cannabis board chief fired after stepping on toes of politically wired staffer and phony allegations of “racially insensitive” remarks

Just call it the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Hackachusetts.

Shannon O’Brien, now former chair of the state Cannabis Control Commission, has been handed her walking papers nearly a year after she was suspended, with full pay, by the state treasurer.

If there is a surprise here, it is that it took State Treasurer Deborah Goldberg’s kangaroo court nearly a year - while racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills - to come to its not-exactly-stunning verdict.