GOOD PEOPLE BAD STORY - Let me start by saying that on July 23 the entire Family Court cadre of personnel seemed to be on vacation. I just drove down the middle of the Cape forfeits basketball game story, a story where all adults involved were good people helping a great kid. My head is now spinning, which does create gravitational problems for small animals.
I do not understand how a star player can be in noncompliance and ineligible while scoring 1,000 points, leading his team to a Henlopen Conference championship and earning a Division I Scholarship along the way.
Cape Henlopen knows the rules and they are the ones responsible for compliance - that the intent of the rule which is to prevent something deemed necessary to prevent is followed.
Legal guardianship is granted by Family Court and I am told by lawyers who practice civil law that it is relatively easy to obtain. In the case of Cape forfeiting basketball games, this particular signed court order designating a relative caregiver as a legal guardian was never drafted and signed and therefore the player in question was ruled to be ineligible for the last year and a half of his high school career while his mother stayed in Georgia taking care of her dying mother.
The question of legal guardianship is tricky and most likely all schools have several athletes in noncompliance with the rule. For example, if my son and his family leave Delaware but his oldest daughter, Anna, stays with me because she wants to play Cape lacrosse and can’t stand the thought of leaving her grandfather Fredman, I do not take custody and I am not her legal guardian. I am simply the grandfather with the funny name. If she plays two full seasons, those games will be forfeited.
NEVER MIND - Ten minutes after writing the previous commentary I received a call back from Andrea Shaffer, who not only is director of special court services for Family Court and handles all questions posed by media types such as myself, but also Andy - as I like to call her - is the sister of former Cape athlete Nick Shaffer and daughter of Charlie and Donna Shaffer. The bottom line answer to my queries is that court-ordered legal guardianship and custody is rather easy to obtain by cooperating parties and, in fact, most forms can be found online at courts.delaware.gov and then click on Family Court and go from there.
Relatives are never de facto guardians - my words - and for the last 32 years coaches in southern Delaware have lamented, but mostly joked at the explanation, “I stay round the way over to my aunt’s house” in probably a noncomplying living arrangement, according to the book of athletic rules.
SHEMIK HOLLERS BACK - Shemik Thompson is taking summer school classes at Central Connecticut State and phoned me just as he got out of morning classes last Thursday. He is such a stalwart young person that I wanted to apply for guardianship, but he is now 18.
He did say that Tom Pederson, coach Dwight Tingle and his mother have called and told him just to hang in there that everything was going to work out.
“I don’t understand what this is all about. I just know my mother went to court to have this done before she left for Georgia (December 2005) and now there’s a problem brought to DIAA by people who weren’t even around when my living situation changed.”
And then we talked basketball and Shemik said how coaches Tingle and Pederson did such a great job getting him ready for this next stage of his life.
“Coach Howie Dickenman is no joke,” Shemik said. “It is running in the early morning and going to class, lifting and study hall and nighttime basketball. And we had better not miss a class or even be late or it is four miles of running before the sun comes up.”
SNIPPETS - The United State women’s field hockey team will play Argentina for the Pan American Gold Medal on Tuesday, July 24.
My son Dave called me at 8 a.m. on Sunday morning telling me I only had one chance to guess how the Saturday debut of David Beckham for the Los Angeles Galaxy was tied into Lewes, Delaware. I said, “Matt Kreitzer refereed the game?”
“How did you know that,” he asked. “That’s amazing. I actually saw him when I turned on the game. How did you know that?’
Matt is a former goalie for Cape Henlopen and I knew he was making a living out on the major league pitch in Los Angeles because his father, John, told me at Food Lion six weeks earlier. I was wearing a triple X black Under Armour shirt standing a road race while fielding calls of soccer trivia. A big guy grounded in a webbed chair looked up and asked, ”Do you play soccer?”
I guess there were artillery mushroom spores the general area of his nose. Got to get out there on the pitch and win some 50/50 balls and deliver a few head butts.
Go on now, git!
