Category: High School Sports

Carver Engineering & Science’s buzzer-beating attempt to overturn a ban from the Public League boys’ basketball playoffs was swatted away on Tuesday as a common pleas court judge denied the team’s plea for an emergency injunction.

The Engineers seemed to be on track to play Tuesday night in the Public League semifinals until last Thursday’s quarterfinal game was halted after opposing fans ran onto the court. E&S led Constitution by 12 points with 1 minute, 11 seconds remaining when the referee called off the game.

A skirmish started when a Constitution player shoved an E&S player. The situation spiked when fans — the referee said they were from Constitution’s bleachers — stormed the court and moved toward E&S players. The reserves from E&S then left the bench and walked onto the court. There were no punches thrown by players from either team.

The Public League ruled that E&S, despite being 71 seconds from advancing, would forfeit the game since its entire bench entered the court, which league president Jimmy Lynch said is a violation of the league’s unsportsmanlike conduct policy. The league’s rules say that a team must forfeit once their “entire bench” enters the field of play.

Constitution was awarded a 2-0 victory and a berth in the semifinals.

E&S argued that its players only came onto the court after opposing fans did first and were there to make sure their teammates were safe. An appeal to the league fell short on Sunday night so they went Tuesday afternoon to City Hall to take its case in front of judge Christopher Hall, hours before Constitution played Imhotep Charter at La Salle.

The E&S players wore their uniforms to court and were joined by coaches and alumni. They asked for an injunction to stop Tuesday night’s semifinal and allow them to play Imhotep Charter later this week. A lawyer presented their case.

“Finding a lawyer to argue this in 24 hours was extremely difficult,” said Miya Brown, a mother of an E&S player. “It was not an easy task. We didn’t even start off with all the proper information. We didn’t have the ref’s statement. They did. We didn’t have the full report. They did. We started off at a disadvantage. But the lawyer tried. The judge pretty much explained to the boys that while this is a harsh reality for us, that when you file an emergency injunction, it has to be that this decision causes irreparable harm and damage.”

E&S will continue its season later this month in the PIAA District 12 tournament but its bid for the school’s first Public League title ended in City Hall Room 275.

“It’s just a disservice,” Brown said. “Not just for this game but for the safety of the athletes. What are you teaching? What is the Philadelphia Public League representing when it comes to the safety of the student athletes? Our student athletes are still disappointed but we’ll continue to encourage them and continue to support them. We’re going to get them ready for states.”

The boys’ basketball players from Carver Engineering & Sciences who left the bench last week came onto the court after fans from Constitution’s stands rushed the court and surrounded their teammates, according to a report by one of the game’s officials that was submitted to the School District of Philadelphia.

The referee said the altercation in Thursday’s Public League playoff game was started by a player from Constitution, who the ref said pushed the E&S player as the E&S player walked away.

“Then I saw a crowd of people from the [Constitution] spectator area of the bleachers running towards those two players,” the referee wrote. “So, I gradually backed off because I didn’t know what was coming next.”

What came next was the reserves from E&S leaving the bench. They “eased onto the court,” the ref said. And that was enough for E&S to be suspended from the league playoffs.

The Engineers were ahead by 12 points with 1 minute, 11 seconds left when an altercation started by an opposing player was inflamed by opposing fans. And now that opposing team is taking E&S’ place on Tuesday against Imhotep Charter in the Public League semifinals at La Salle University.

Representatives from E&S met Sunday night on Zoom with Jimmy Lynch, the Public League president. Lynch told them the ruling stood. League rules say that a team must forfeit once their “entire bench” enters the field of play.

The PIAA told E&S that the decision stood with the school district. A school district spokeswoman said Monday that the decision would not be changed. Lynch could not be reached for comment.

The representatives from E&S did not argue that their players left the bench but they were hoping that the rule could be applied with the context of the situation: the players came onto the court to protect their teammates once their teammates were surrounded by spectators. The E&S players did not throw a punch or look to fight, the parents said.

“If our students engaged in the on-court incident we would’ve had penalties and suspensions,” said Miya Brown, a mother of an E&S player. “But because we avoided the confrontation, we have been disqualified from continuing on. All of this is so disgusting. It really is. The mission is supposed to be about student safety but they’re ignoring the safety part of this incident.”

“If this brawl happened at the opposing team’s end of the bench and our student athletes ran to the other end of the bench, I could understand. If this happened on center court and our student athletes left the bench, I could understand. But this happened in front of our bench and the crowd is running toward our student athletes. There is no way you can make a just decision based on those facts. It got out of control.”

E&S did not practice Monday but remained hopeful that something would change before tipoff of Tuesday’s semifinal. That seems unlikely.

The Engineers were 20-4 this season before the forfeit became their fifth loss. They won a tournament in Northeastern Pa. and took Imhotep — the defending league champions — to overtime in January before losing. They wanted another shot.

“That’s the matchup everyone wants to see,” said Dave McField, a father of an E&S player.

The referee said he asked during the first quarter for security guards to be placed near the Constitution fans because “they were being unruly.” At halftime, he told E&S’ athletic director that he needed more security. He said a security guard stopped the game in the third quarter to warn the fans but the guard did not stay in the area.

“So when everything jumped off,” he wrote. “Those same unruly fans rushed the court.”

The referee said he planned to eject the Constitution player from the game “because he started this chain of events” and “was the only player I saw push or hit any opponent.” The referee stood in the corner of the court as fans overtook the floor. E&S was 71 seconds left from reaching their first league semifinals in 20 years. Instead, their season was about to end.

“I glanced at the [Constitution] bench area where I saw the head coach next to about five of his bench players,” the ref wrote. “At that time, I called the game and walked off.”

Miya Brown was in the crowd Thursday afternoon when a rush of fans stormed the court, surrounded the teenage basketball players, and put a stop to a Public League boys’ basketball playoff game.

She watched her son — a senior captain at Carver Engineering & Science — leave the court and protect his sister, one of the team’s student managers.

“It was terrifying,” Brown said.

The incident started with a Constitution player going nose-to-nose with an E&S player during a stoppage with 1 minute, 11 seconds left in the fourth quarter. Host E&S was ahead, 61-49, and closing in on a trip to the league’s semifinals.

The E&S player raised his hands and walked backward, attempting to de-escalate the situation. The Constitution player followed him before shoving him. By then, two players from Constitution had left the bench and walked onto the court. Fans soon ran onto the floor, and the E&S players left the bench to join their teammates.

No punches were thrown by players from either side, and the situation eventually settled down. The game ended with 71 seconds left. So did the season for E&S.

The Public League disqualified E&S from Tuesday’s semifinal since its entire bench went on the court, which league president James Lynch said is a violation of the league’s unsportsmanlike conduct policy.

Constitution won the game on a forfeit and will play in the semis against Imhotep Charter. Representatives from E&S met Sunday night with Public League officials, who said they would not change the ruling.

“A fair decision should have been made,” Brown said. “If you can’t determine that we were not at fault and we won’t proceed, then no one should proceed. This teaches teams that if you can’t compete, you cheat. That’s not the way to teach these student athletes.”

The league’s rules say that a team will be suspended for the following game if its “entire team leaves their bench area and steps onto the field of play during an incident.” A player will be suspended, but not the team, if he leaves the bench.

Lynch said “several” Constitution players will be suspended for Tuesday’s game. But E&S is challenging the ruling as it said the situation was no longer “a basketball game” once fans ran onto the court and caused an unruly scene.

“The kids didn’t come off the bench when it was just the kids going back and forth,” said Dave McField, a father of an E&S player. “When they saw the mob of fans coming at their teammates, that’s when they came onto the court out of fear to get their teammates to safety. None of the kids were in a fighting stance or throwing punches. They’re very good kids. We’ve never been in this type of situation.”

The game was tense before the incident as players from both teams were issued technical fouls in the first quarter.

“As far as officiating goes, that was the only attempt to get control of the game,” said Nande Hardy, a relative of E&S coach Dustin Hardy-Moore.

Brown said the referees failed to “keep the temperature of the game at bay.” The final stoppage was a whistle for a foul on Constitution, and the referees did not step between the two players jostling on the court. The situation soon unraveled.

“To look around and see the faces of the parents because they are worried about their kids on the court and the kids in the stands are worried about their safety,” Hardy said. “You have kids running on the court with hands in their jackets and grown adults running onto the court. We had no idea where this thing was going to go.”

The teams met earlier this season, with E&S winning by five points. The players played together in the summer on the AAU circuit, and this was a game with big stakes: a chance to go to the Public League Final Four at La Salle University.

“They worked so hard in the spring and the winter and then for it to end like this is a tragedy,” McField said. “It’s unfair, very unfair. At the least, if we don’t get to go, they shouldn’t get to go. All of the kids are kind of let down. They’re in a shock like, ‘Well, how do they get to go?’ I could see if the game was close. There were 71 seconds left in the game with a 12-point lead and we had the ball. How do they get to go?”

The parents said they emailed Lynch about the ruling and hope it can be reversed before Tuesday. E&S, once a league power, has never won a Public League title, and this season was a return to relevance as the forfeit dropped its record to 20-5. E&S was eyeing a rematch with Imhotep, the perennial power that edged the Engineers last month in overtime.

“It was tough,” Brown said of the loss to Imhotep. “But we lined up, shook hands, said it was a damn good game, came back to the school, and worked on what we needed to do to continue to grow. That’s what we promote at Carver. No violence. We grow. We’ve lost plenty of games in the last four years, we’ve never tried to incite a fight or a riot or any unsportsmanlike behavior.”

McField said an assistant coach from Constitution said his team didn’t want to play Tuesday as it felt the spot belonged to E&S. Now, E&S hopes the league feels the same.

“We did absolutely nothing wrong,” Brown said. “And I say we as in students, coaches, and community. Our students stayed in the stands and our coaches instructed our kids to stay on the bench. But if you were in that audience and you saw the crowd of people swarm those kids, there’s no way that the decision that was made took into consideration that those student athletes feared for their safety.”

Carver Engineering and Science’s quest for its first Public League boys’ basketball title was halted after the Engineers were disqualified following a skirmish in Thursday’s quarterfinal game, where they were 71 seconds away from winning.

E&S led visiting Constitution by 12 points in the fourth quarter when a shoving match paused the game. Video reveals players from both benches staying on the sidelines before fans stormed the court and surrounded players.

The E&S players left the bench while the majority of Constitution’s reserve players remained on the sideline. No players from either team appeared to throw punches.

The game ended with E&S leading, 61-49, but they were later informed that Constitution would advance to Tuesday’s semifinal against Imhotep Charter. James Lynch, the president of the Public League, said the league reviewed the referee’s report and video footage before disqualifying E&S.

“Several players from Constitution have also been assessed suspensions due to their involvement in the incident,” Lynch wrote in an email. “However, the entire Carver E&S team leaving the bench is what resulted in the forfeit loss for that game according to the PPL Unsportsmanlike conduct policy.”

The league’s policy says, “if an entire team leaves their bench area and steps onto the field of play during an incident, the entire team will be ejected from the game, and will serve a one-game suspension for their next contest. The ejected team will be assessed a forfeit for the current contest, and will forfeit their next contest.”

E&S coach Dustin Hardy-Moore posted on social media that his team was disqualified despite “the opposing team and fans inciting a fight.” The coach, who could not be reached for comment, posted a screenshot that showed seven Constitution players on the court when the skirmish began.

“And our bench is still on the bench,” Hardy-Moore wrote.

The Inquirer also reached out to Constitution for comment on Friday, but did not receive a response.

In the 1980s, baseball scout John Young noticed a declining share of Black or Latino draft prospects in his hometown of Los Angeles. With funding from Major League Baseball, he started a youth program dubbed “Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities” (RBI) to address the disparity in 1989.

RBI has since spread across the country, including Philadelphia, as baseball’s preeminent youth outreach program. The Phillies say their RBI program serves more than 6,000 children in the city and the surrounding region by providing organized baseball and softball leagues, free equipment, and game tickets to youth participants.

But contrary to RBI’s founding mission, Philadelphia’s program mostly serves the city’s predominantly white, middle-class neighborhoods in the Northeast.

“The programs we have in North Philadelphia are programs that save at-risk kids,” said Dave Fisher, who runs Tioga United Baseball. “The programs that they have in the Northeast are programs to evaluate and elevate the talent of their kids.”

Among nearly 200 teams across 35 programs listed on the Phillies RBI’s registration website, about two-thirds were located in Northeast Philadelphia and 15% in New Jersey. Only about a dozen teams were in North or West Philadelphia, where the city’s highest share of Black residents reside.

Neither the Phillies nor Major League Baseball returned requests for comment.

The distribution of RBI teams reflects Philadelphia’s unequal youth sports landscape, confirmed by a recent city-funded study that found neighborhoods with more white residents had more fields, amenities in better shape, and more youth sports programs compared to other areas. In Northeast Philadelphia, there is simply more baseball: The Philadelphia Parks & Recreation Baseball league reflects a similar disparity of Northeast teams as the Phillies’ RBI leagues.

Several North Philadelphia coaches are part of Phillies RBI and say they have benefited from the league’s free equipment and clinics. But they say the program is a better fit for well-established teams that already have foundational needs met. Teams working against the tide of economic inequality, lower parental involvement, and children not being exposed to baseball early cannot recruit enough to play in the RBI league.

“You’ll find more parents who are financially able and culturally able to give baseball to their children at such a younger age of 6, 7, or 8,” said Fisher, who participates in RBI. “Kids at that age are groomed through baseball to be able to have batting coaches, pitching coaches, hitting coaches, fielding coaches.”

Phillies RBI offers noncompetitive leagues that introduce children ages 5 to 12 to baseball and softball as well as competitive leagues for children 13 and older. The program’s website says teams “must be located in an area that serves children who are unable to afford to play in an organized baseball league without assistance.”

David Lisby, who coaches the North Philly Camelots in Strawberry Mansion, was part of Phillies RBI but withdrew after six years because of a lack of players on his team. This past season, he was able to recruit only 15 children from three age brackets to make a single team.

“With the Phillies RBI program, I wasn’t seeing them coming down to really get the kids involved,” Lisby said.

Amos Huron, the executive director of the Anderson Monarchs in South Philadelphia — which does not participate in Phillies RBI — said the RBI program is more focused on areas where baseball is already played rather than introducing the sport to new players.

“There’s such wide swaths of the city where kids are never getting exposed to the game, and there’s only one entity in the city that has the baseball credibility and financial capacity to create a system that spreads across the city, and I think it’s a shame that they are not doing that,” he said.

Coaches on ways to improve

Running a community baseball or softball program in Philadelphia is a grind. Coaches — many of whom are volunteers — maintain their own fields, recruit players, and take care of all the logistics in running a nonprofit on top of their on-field duties.

They say the Phillies could help with that.

“I did a lot of stuff on my own, a lot of stuff. Field stuff, cutting trees down,” said Tyrone Young, who founded and leads the Heritage Baseball League in North Philadelphia. “Anybody that didn’t have the drive that I have will probably get frustrated and give up if they didn’t have more support. More support can help.”

Young, who endorses the Phillies RBI program, also said it could sponsor more events and clinics to teach children baseball in North Philadelphia.

Josh Throckmorton, a coach with Give and Go Athletics in Brewerytown and director of program development with the Philadelphia Youth Sports Collaborative, said coaches at smaller programs could benefit from off-field support, such as help with securing insurance and background checks.

“I think administrative support would be huge,” he said. “I think providing some training to help coaches for these really small programs market their programs and manage registration, I think that could be huge.”

This year, a small group of teams in North and West Philadelphia, organized by Germantown’s Urban Youth Kings and Queens and supported by the Phillies, formed a separate RBI group aimed at children ages 7 to 12. The subleague benefited programs like Throckmorton’s, which withdrew from the larger RBI league after finding its first-time players mismatched against other teams, he said.

The four teams in the league played eight games in the spring and some of the teams continued practicing into the summer. This spring, league organizers are seeking to double the number of teams and serve an additional 100 or more children between the ages of 6 and 9.

“We’ve already gotten outreach from families asking us when baseball season is going to start again,” Throckmorton said. “It did exactly what we were hoping for.”

Playing Fields, Not Killing Fields is an Inquirer collaboration with Temple’s Claire Smith Center for Sports Media and the Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting, to produce a series examining the current state of Philadelphia’s youth recreation infrastructure and programs. The project will explore the challenges and solutions to sports serving as a viable response to gun violence and an engine to revitalize city neighborhoods.