A Fairbanks Superior Court judge has dismissed a lawsuit Monroe Catholic High School filed last year on behalf of its boys basketball team. The suit aimed to get Alaska sports regulators to reanalyze the team’s record in hopes they’d move to a less competitive division.
The Fairbanks private school claims the Alaska School Activities Association, or ASAA, misapplied its own classification system for boys basketball back in 2023.
But on Oct. 20, Superior Court Judge Earl Peterson dismissed the case, granting a motion that had been filed by the state sports regulators. In his order, Peterson wrote that “Monroe has failed to provide a scintilla of evidence to support that ASAA applied the wrong guidance or used improper data in its analysis.”
The dispute dates back to November 2020, when the ASAA board adopted the new classification system.
That system assesses basketball programs within 25 miles of Fairbanks, as well as programs around Anchorage, Wasilla and Soldotna; it set up a two-step procedure to analyze those teams’ rosters and performance levels – instead of school size – to decide their division. The board-adopted guidelines also established a review process that allowed a team to move back down a division if their record showed they weren’t competitive enough.
The new protocol saw Monroe shift from 3A to 4A, where Alaska’s largest schools play. Monroe won a state championship in 3A in 2021, which was their final year in that division before they got moved up.
In April 2023, Monroe became eligible for the review, and the sports regulators’ analysis again determined the boys team for the roughly 100-student private high school should stay competing at the top level. It’s that review the Monroe lawsuit had been challenging, though the school had also filed two unsuccessful administrative appeals before the lawsuit in Fairbanks Superior Court.
Fleur Roberts, the attorney for Monroe, said she thinks the court’s dismissal got it wrong, and she filed a motion requesting that Peterson reconsider. She said being in the same division as the state’s biggest schools is tough on the players and that the classification system targeted the private school.
“It’s like … little Johnny comes to you, and he says, ‘Oh, we can’t beat Monroe, and what are we gonna do about this Catholic school? We can’t beat them,’” she said. “Well, okay, just slice them out. Okay, don’t worry about it, we’ll just slice out – you rise to the top, and they slice you off. You know? That’s it – rise to the top, and they slice you off. That’s what’s going on.”
Roberts claims the court’s recent decision doesn’t account for a central part of her argument. She said that in May 2023 ASAA added language to the classification system, and then retroactively applied it to their review of Monroe. She claims it made a difference in the outcome.
The language added in 2023 says that, for part of the review procedure, teams will be “analyzed based on the classification they were prior to being moved to the higher classification level,” according to exhibits in Roberts’ motion for reconsideration.
“So that’s retroactive, and you can’t do it. You can’t change the speed limit. You can’t change the three-point line in the middle of the game,” she said.
Citing the reconsideration request, Billy Strickland, the executive director for the activities association, declined to comment for this story due to the ongoing litigation.
Though Roberts argues the May 2023 language affected Monroe’s placement, the case's history suggests otherwise.
Peterson’s recent decision follows a partial preliminary injunction the judge granted earlier this year, which had forced the activities association to redo the 2023 review of Monroe under the regulations as they existed in November 2020. The court-ordered analysis, completed by ASAA in June and backed up by Peterson’s own review of the data, still said the team was properly classified as 4A, according to the order granting dismissal.
Peterson’s October order ultimately concluded that stepping the team down a division would violate ASAA guidelines, and he wrote that doing so would also risk undermining the efforts of Monroe’s student-athletes and “may be reasonably viewed as diminishing the merit of their accomplishments.”
In an August brief supporting the motion to dismiss, ASAA’s attorney, Allen Clendaniel, wrote that his client “unambiguously complied” with the court order, and the brief argued that it’s “time for Monroe Catholic’s basketball team to battle on the basketball court, instead of the courtroom.”
According to the court system, if the judge does not issue a written ruling within 30 days from the date the motion for reconsideration was filed, or within 30 days from when the other party files a response, whichever is later, the motion is considered denied.