Ballplayer left out of bounds

PREP FOCUS: Officials discovered home-schooled junior was on wrong team

By steve brandon

The Portland Tribune, Apr 17, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (7 Reader comments)

DENISE FARWELL / P0RTLAND TRIBUNE

John Collier has to watch his former Madison teammates play without him. The home-schooled junior, it was discovered, lives outside the school’s boundary and is ineligible to play for the team.

Madison High shortstop John Collier was stunned last week when officials told him, “You’re out!” –for the season, and maybe for the rest of his career at the school.

Collier, a home-schooled junior, was in the middle of his third year of baseball for Madison. His brother, James, previously played three seasons for the Senators.

“When we asked eight years ago, we were told we were on the line and could go to Madison or Grant,” says Joel Collier, their father. “The boys chose Madison, so they could play baseball with their friends.”

But about a week ago, Madison officials noticed that the Colliers’ home of 13 years, at Northeast 52nd Avenue and Irving Street, is in the Grant district, about four blocks outside the Madison boundary.

“I was called to the athletic director’s office,” John Collier says. “He said, ‘You should be playing at Grant. There’s nothing I can do.’

“It’s kind of hard, kind of frustrating,” Collier says. “It was fun playing with my friends. I’ve played with a lot of them since Rose City Little League.”

For six years – John also ran cross country last fall –the boys had been approved to play for Madison.

“Adults screwed this up,” first-year Madison baseball coach Mike Keller says. “And it seems no one has the authority to let him play.”

Tom Welter, executive director of the Oregon Schools Activities Association, says apparently neither his organization, which oversees high school sports, nor the Oregon Department of Education, nor Portland Public Schools, nor the Portland Interscholastic League, can hear an appeal from the Colliers.

“Home-school students can only play for the school in whose boundaries they live,” Welter says.

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