How OSSAA’s Legal Loss Extends Controversy 

By JC Hallman, Oklahoma Watch

Payne County District Judge Michael Kulling heard arguments on Sept. 5 in an ongoing case about a handful of teenagers who want to play basketball.

“This court is a strong believer that athletic endeavors are very important,” Kulling said in a ruling that placed a temporary restraining order on the Oklahoma Secondary Schools Activities Association, which on Aug. 13 denied four teenagers a year of eligibility at Glencoe High School, to which they had arranged to transfer for the 2025-26 school year.

“The rigors that come with athletic endeavors carry valuable lessons – the values of hard work, of physical fitness, of teamwork, of how to be victorious in a good, meaningful way, and how to accept defeat,” Kulling said.

The temporary restraining order cleared the way for the teenagers to begin basketball practice on Oct. 1, with their first game scheduled for Nov. 4; two weeks after that, the legal fight between the students and the OSSAA will continue with a hearing on matters of discovery, with a protracted contest still to come.

Details of the OSSAA’s latest legal imbroglio, one of dozens over the past two decades, have been widely reported. The case has drawn the attention of Oklahoma’s highest officeholders. The organization oversees student activities, including sports, music and debate for Oklahoma public schools and members. 

They’re Not the Dream Team

“It’s a dispute between two small schools that lights up the entire state,” said Oklahoma City attorney Hannah Whitten, who represents the players. 

In other words, the OSSAA case stems from a low-stakes confrontation, a petty feud involving small-town neighbors and relatives, but taps into a legal quagmire with state-wide implications.

In May, Stillwater small businessman and longtime basketball coach Garrett Schubert accepted a position as coach at Glencoe High School; Schubert previously coached basketball for nearby Morrison High School. Subsequently, Schubert’s son and four other students, three of whom were long acquainted with Schubert, arranged to transfer to Glencoe, all but one of whom were from Morrison.

Lawyers for the OSSAA argued that Schubert had recruited a crack starting lineup for his new team; the recruitment of players would violate OSSAA rules.

Schubert and the teenagers’ parents denied that anyone had been recruited; in one case, a mother said she transferred her son to Glencoe because she witnessed a coach at another school put his hands on her son in anger.

Schubert acknowledged that transferring schools to stack talent could be a concern in Oklahoma – college scouts wanted to see how players performed against 6A teams – but he rejected the suggestion that the transfers would give his Class B team a competitive edge.

“They’re average kids, at best,” Schubert said. “It’s not like they went 30-3 last year. They won maybe 16 games. They just want to play basketball together.”

At the Sept. 5 hearing, OSSAA lawyers said that in the current year, the organization had approved 908 transfers, representing 96% of all requests.

They Can’t Articulate Their Own Rules

On Aug. 13, the OSSAA board, which includes several people who represent schools that potentially compete with Glencoe, voted unanimously to deny the teenagers’ eligibility. By that time, the OSSAA’s grounds for denial had shifted from the obscure recruiting rule to an even more complex rule that ostensibly prohibits contact between coaches and prospective players. 

The logic of the so-called linked rule, the one prohibiting coach-player communication prior to the player’s enrollment, is hard to follow; nevertheless, the OSSAA’s argument at the Sept. 5 hearing focused almost exclusively on the linked rule.

The argument turns on defining “enrollment.” Depending on which other rules you read, formal enrollment may be impossible before the first day of school, but an online portal to seek enrollment opens on June 1, and it may be possible to pre-enroll even before that.

In the Sept. 5 hearing, the OSSAA’s case hinged on a hair-splitting argument that the teenagers participated in a Glencoe basketball camp two days before the June 1 enrollment portal opened, violating the linked rule. Whitten presented evidence, however, that the Glencoe superintendent had already told the students they were pre-enrolled and that Schubert was not coaching at the camp at all.

Regardless, Whitten said, the OSSAA’s rules on enrollment were shoddily composed and poorly understood by an organization that routinely spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend itself in court.

“The OSSAA is treating a group of kids like they’re going to be the next Serge Ibaka and like their parents have been spending millions of dollars to make sure they’re going to be the next Thunder player,” Whitten said. “That’s not what happened. These kids are working on their families’ farms, they’re hanging out with their friends, and they just want to play basketball. I don’t believe a group of unelected bureaucrats using taxpayer money should be permitted to weaponize one of the most expensive law firms in Oklahoma to make these parents, their school and their coach take off from work and education to fight back when the OSSAA can’t even articulate their own rules.”

Whitten leads a team of eight lawyers who have offered the teenagers free representation.

Misconception Among Parents

The OSSAA was formed four years after statehood, in 1911, with a goal of establishing rules to produce a degree of fairness for competition between schools. In the 1960s, the organization was changed from an athletics association to an activities association; today, 100,000 students at 482 high schools participate in athletic and non-athletic programs overseen by the OSSAA.

The OSSAA’s lawyers, Crowe & Dunlevy, the oldest law firm in Oklahoma, and OSSAA Executive Director David Jackson, refused to answer questions about the Glencoe case.

Nevertheless, the OSSAA has its fans.

Karissa Niehoff, CEO of the National Federation of State High School Associations, which offers education and guiding principles for associations in all fifty states, offered praise for the OSSAA and for Jackson, who grew up in Pauls Valley and served a one-year term as board president of NFHS.

“They advocate on behalf of kids,” Niehoff said of the OSSAA. “They’re wonderful.”

Niehoff said lawsuits such as the Glencoe case are among the biggest challenges facing state associations nationwide; parents are quick to go to lawyers or legislators, she said.

“Youth sports have gone from formative to performative,” Niehoff said, citing cases of a 3-year-old entering an elite soccer camp and a tennis kid with a dedicated backhand coach. “There’s a real misconception about the purpose of sports among parents.”

In the context of the Glencoe case, Whitten could not have disagreed more.

“I dispute that the parents are the problem here,” Whitten said. “But even if it was the parents’ fault, that’s not a rational basis for punishing the kids.”

Frequent Litigation

Niehoff estimated that in large states such as California and Florida, with populations of 40 million and 23 million, respectively, state high school associations might wind up in legal disputes requiring court resolution once per year.

Oklahoma court records reveal that in the last 22 years, the OSSAA, in a state with a population of just 4 million, has gone to court at least 40 times, 28 as the defendant.

“Oklahoma has had more than their share of challenges,” Niehoff said.

Attorneys who have opposed the OSSAA in the past said it’s not just the frequency of cases, but the tenor with which OSSAA attorneys play the game.

Kevin Sain of Idabel, who argued numerous OSSAA cases after first hearing of the organization in 2009, and who is a member of the legal team in the Glencoe matter, said that in the past OSSAA lawyers battered him with a hostile tone and boasted of an unblemished record of victories at the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

“I made it a mission to change that fact,” Sain said.

It was the nature of how people spoke with you, Sain said. Even in a matter’s introductory phone call, he would be met with raised voices, he said.

“I have never had such an adversarial relationship with lawyers on the other side of cases,” Sain said.

Chad Smith of Tahlequah, a former principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, who won a landmark Oklahoma Supreme Court case, Scott v. OSSAA, establishing that the OSSAA is a state actor subject to the constitutions of Oklahoma and the United States, agreed that fighting the OSSAA was an ugly affair.

The OSSAA lawyers were extremely arrogant, Smith said; they filed sanctions against him over frivolous matters.

“They played the card of intimidation,” Smith said. “When an opposing lawyer does that, you think they are being silly because they don’t have anything else to argue. It wasn’t a pleasant experience.”

Crowe & Dunlevy personnel have shifted since the Scott case; new attorneys argued the Glencoe case.  

The Sept. 5 hearing featured feisty exchanges, but Kulling, the judge, ultimately praised the professionalism of lawyers on both sides.

Cease and Desist

Whitten said that the Scott v. OSSAA decision had established an authority that the OSSAA was now ignoring.

“The 2013 Scott opinion is what needs to be the law of the land,” Whitten said.

The Glencoe case tapped into a fundamental conflict between OSSAA rules and Oklahoma law.

In 2021, Senate Bill 783, passed during the COVID-19 pandemic, expanded the ability of students to transfer between schools, complicating the OSSAA’s efforts to enforce rules meant to ensure fair play.

In 2024, Attorney General Gentner Drummond issued a sharply worded cease-and-desist order for the obscure linked rule. Taking note of the OSSAA’s checkered legal history, Drummond said the linked rule solved a nonexistent problem with unreasonable force and ordered the organization to abandon its enforcement.

The linked rule remained dormant for a year. With slight modification, it went back into effect just weeks before the Glencoe teenagers attended a basketball camp. Once again, the rule has become the focus of intense scrutiny.

In a sign of how far-reaching the Glencoe case is, Gov. Kevin Stitt issued a statement in support of the teenagers.

“It is disappointing that OSSAA would continue to perpetuate a system that bars students from the opportunity to compete,” Stitt said.

Not a System to Protect Minors

Niehoff, of the NFHS, and the teenagers’ lawyers agree that bias and conflicts of interest, decisions made to benefit schools that individual board members represent rather than states as a whole, posed an intractable problem.

Niehoff offered the safeguard of proactivity on the part of NFHS in promoting the values they hope to instill.

“If we are really clear with our associations and parents and kids about our mission, that begins to address concerns about bias,” Niehoff said.

Whitten agreed that conflicts of interest were a problem, but she was less sanguine on whether the system could respond adequately when board members strayed from a duty to represent all of a state’s youth.

“The OSSAA has no written rules on recusing from voting on eligibility cases which deal with schools you play directly,” Whitten said. “This is not a system that is built to protect minors; it is built to protect the OSSAA at the expense of minors.”

Mysteries Remain

What remains to be discovered is why the battle is being waged at all.

Answers may emerge as the Glencoe case moves into the discovery phase, when witnesses will be deposed.

“I think the OSSAA has the impression that if they backed off an inappropriate eligibility ruling, then it’s open season on the OSSAA,” Whitten said.

The contentious case will resume in the fall. In the meantime, the Glencoe teenagers are preparing for their season.

Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.