Does High School Track Have A Celebration Problem?

NCHSAA 8A State Championships Boys 4x400m Finals

At last month's NCHSAA 8A State Track and Field Championship, the boys' team battle came down to the 4x400m relay. This is the stuff athletic dreams are made of: the biggest meet of your life, being determined by the outcome of the final race - just you, three teammates, and four laps of the track to determine your destiny.

Almost immediately, Mallard Creek initiated the lengthy appeal process, one that was ultimately successful. On June 2nd, Mallard Creek's disqualification was reversed and the school was awarded a share of the team state championship. But some damage had been done. Rather than being able to share a crowning achievement at the end of a long season - or a long career for Mallard Creek seniors - the athletes had been stuck in a sort of bureaucratic limbo and robbed of that moment of joy. Here's hoping some sort of last-minute team dinner was thrown together for the Mallard Creek squad, where the never-ending pasta flowed freely and other diners were confused by the raucous cheers echoing out of some local Italian eatery's rentable banquet hall.

Ultimately, the system worked in a technical sense: after the appeal process, the correct call was made. But it was still a major dust-up over one person's interpretation of Rule 4-6-1, which ultimately comes down to whether an action is taunting and disrespectful, or spontaneous and celebratory.

As is nearly always the case with stories about track and field that break containment and become aggregated by mainstream news outlets, additional context is helpful. After winning the 300m hurdles earlier in the meet, a warning about taunting had allegedly been issued directly to Brown by a meet official. He flexed for some cameras before celebrating with a teammate. However, Mallard Creek coach Sam Willoughby said he wasn't informed of the warning. Based on this accounting of what happened, if you view Brown's raised hand as excessive, then disqualification was the right call based on the fact that a prior warning had been issued.

(Back in 2023 there was another viral disqualification for celebrating by Brody Buffington in Maryland, who was the state's top sprinter. Buffington and his Catoctin squad faced disqualification in both the MPSSAA Indoor and Outdoor State Championships.)

Now, the point of this blog post isn't to direct the collective animus of the MileSplit community at one overworked official who, in a high stakes moment, made a call that by most accounts was in line with at least one interpretation of the rule book. It's to discuss why this issue is likely to happen again, and what we can do to remedy it as a sport. 

Let's first consider why DQs for actions deemed unsportsmanlike even exist by looking at the overall mission statement for high school sports, at least in theory. Yes, they're meant to be fun. They're meant to be a competitive outlet. They're meant to provide an opportunity to represent your school and community. 

But perhaps most importantly for the 99% of athletes who won't go pro, they're meant to teach transferable life skills. Building relationships that withstand stressful situations; learning self-discipline and accountability; developing lifelong healthy habits around exercise and movement; and figuring out how to control your most base emotions and remain civil under pressure or duress. It's this last one that leads to DQs for taunting or excessive celebrations.

No matter how dorky and out of touch that sentiment may sound, unless your long-term career ambitions are to become a briefly viral content creator best known for getting repeatedly kicked in the head after picking fights with strangers on the street, you'll be well served throughout your life by being able to take a deep breath and consider the consequences of acting on impulse.

All that said - nothing about what Mallard Creek's spontaneous moment of restrained celebration reads to us as excessive or dangerous or even rude. As the fact that it was overturned shows us, the initial DQ was probably the wrong call.  

Let's pivot to the state of track and field officiating for a moment. If you're reading this, you're presumably a diehard fan of track and field. As a track-lover, are you planning on volunteering your time to officiate local all-comers meets this summer? We're assuming the answer is a resounding no.

And you - presumably - aren't alone. All sports are facing an acute officiating crisis. It's becoming increasingly hard to find officials, and the ones that are actively involved are overworked, underpaid, generally unappreciated, and in many cases, nearing retirement age. If it requires a handful of officials to properly oversee a standard regular season high school invitation - a figure that swells to dozens for something as major as a state championship - then with an increasingly shallow pool of officials, we can expect more mistakes or lapses in coverage.

In a perfect world, track and field competition would be a pure assessment of who is fastest, can throw the farthest, jump the highest, etc. without any need for refereeing. But as this entire article has alluded to up to this point, we do not live in a perfect world! It's essential to the fairness of competition that there are people at track meets whose job it is to enforce rules and issue penalties for those who break them, intentionally or otherwise.

But in our current reality, the people tasked with keeping track meets honest are forced to stand in the hot sun - straw hats can only provide so much respite - for full days at a time, and make judgement calls about possible infractions where the difference between fair and foul is often a matter of millimeters. Maybe they got a free lunch for their efforts, and if they're lucky, nobody yelled at them over the course of their duties. 

It's an unenviable position to be in, so it's almost excusable that track officials slip up and sometimes overstep. Especially because generally speaking, the only tool at their disposal is outright disqualification, regardless of severity of misstep. Warnings aren't always feasible to doll out, and when you're a hammer, the whole world can look like a nail. 

Now imagine if track and field officials were given a range of more tangible options for dealing with rule-breakers. Proportional penalties aren't a novel suggestion on our end. In response to another controversial disqualification from last weekend's NCAA championships, MileSplit contributor Alex Predhome - and friends/anonymous internet peers - suggested utilizing minor time penalties as more appropriate punitive measures for track and field rules infractions.

In most other sports, violation of one small rule one or two times doesn't lead to disqualification - it results in the opposition being awarded a slight competitive edge in an enforceable and quantifiable way: a change of possession, free throws, penalty kicks, loss of yardage, etc.

While this may sound like awarding even more power to officials who - as we've discussed - can make mistakes, in reality, it curtails their ability to outright remove an athlete or team from qualification over a judgement call. The all-or-nothing penalty becomes the harshest option, rather than the only one.

Of course, implementing a penalty system like this by one state's high school sports federation would be no small bureaucratic feat. Expanding some version of this system to all states feels like an impossibility. While we condone lobbying your state's governing body to explore some sort of policy like this if you feel compelled to do so, the easiest way for you to personally prevent misplaced DQs is to become an official yourself! Seriously. 

Convince a friend or two to get trained up, and start giving back to the sport that's given you so much. Most of the time you'll simply be ensuring things run smoothly and that athletes stay in their lanes or don't foul in jumps. You'll get to wear a straw hat if you'd like. You might get a bit of walking around money. And in the rare cases where subjective calls need to be made, it'll be you at the helm. Generational differences in what's considered reasonable versus excessive celebration will continue to result in DQs unless things change. Track and field is a youth-driven sport, typically officiated by older generations. Only good can come from some younger people getting involved at this level!