Opinion ID: 2518817
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Knight and its progeny in this court

Text: In Knight, supra, 3 Cal.4th 296, 11 Cal.Rptr.2d 2, 834 P.2d 696, the plurality noted that there are two types of assumption of risk: primary and secondary. (Id. at pp. 308-309, 11 Cal.Rptr.2d 2, 834 P.2d 696 (plur. opn. of George, J.).) Under the primary assumption of risk doctrine, the defendant owes no duty to protect a plaintiff from particular harms arising from ordinary, or simple negligence. (Ibid.) In a sports context, the doctrine bars liability because the plaintiff is said to have assumed the particular risks inherent in a sport by choosing to participate. (Id. at pp. 315-316, 11 Cal.Rptr.2d 2, 834 P.2d 696.) Thus, a court need not ask what risks a particular plaintiff subjectively knew of and chose to encounter, but instead must evaluate the fundamental nature of the sport and the defendant's role in or relationship to that sport in order to determine whether the defendant owes a duty to protect a plaintiff from the particular risk of harm. ( [ Knight, supra, 3 Cal.4th] at pp. 313, 315-317, 11 Cal. Rptr.2d 2, 834 P.2d 696.) ( Avila, supra, 38 Cal.4th at p. 161, 41 Cal.Rptr.3d 299, 131 P.3d 383.) The Knight court used baseball as an example. In baseball, a batter is not supposed to carelessly throw the bat after getting a hit and starting to run to first base. However, the primary assumption of risk doctrine recognizes that vigorous bat deployment is an integral part of the sport and a risk players assume when they choose to participate. Especially in the heat of competition, and in an effort to get to first base quickly, a batter may be careless in freeing himself or herself from the bat's encumbrance. Thus, under the doctrine, a batter does not have a duty to another player to avoid carelessly throwing the bat after getting a hit. In Knight, supra, 3 Cal.4th 296, 11 Cal. Rptr.2d 2, 834 P.2d 696, we stressed the chilling effect that would flow from imposing liability on touch football players for ordinary careless conduct. [E]ven when a participant's conduct violates a rule of the game and may subject the violator to internal sanctions prescribed by the sport itself, imposition of legal liability for such conduct might well alter fundamentally the nature of the sport by deterring participants from vigorously engaging in activity.... (Id. at pp. 318-319, 11 Cal.Rptr.2d 2, 834 P.2d 696, italics omitted.) Accordingly, we concluded that coparticipants' limited duty of care is to refrain from intentionally injuring one another or engaging in conduct that is so reckless as to be totally outside the range of the ordinary activity involved in the sport. (Id. at p. 320, 11 Cal.Rptr.2d 2, 834 P.2d 696, fn. omitted.) A majority of this court has since extended Knight's application of the primary assumption of risk doctrine to other sports. (See Avila, supra, 38 Cal.4th at p. 161, 41 Cal.Rptr.3d 299, 131 P.3d 383; Kahn, supra, 31 Cal.4th at pp. 1004-1005, 4 Cal.Rptr.3d 103, 75 P.3d 30; Cheong v. Antablin (1997) 16 Cal.4th 1063, 1067-1068, 68 Cal.Rptr.2d 859, 946 P.2d 817 (Cheong) .) Cheong, supra, 16 Cal.4th 1063, 68 Cal. Rptr.2d 859, 946 P.2d 817, involved skiing. One skier sued another for injuries he suffered when the other skier turned and unintentionally ran into him. We concluded that, under the applicable common law principles, a skier owes a duty to fellow skiers not to injure them intentionally or to act recklessly, but a skier may not sue another for simple negligence.... (Id. at p. 1066, 68 Cal.Rptr.2d 859, 946 P.2d 817.) Because there was no evidence that the defendant acted recklessly or intentionally injured the plaintiff, we concluded that the defendant's motion for summary judgment was properly granted. (Ibid.) In Kahn, supra, 31 Cal.4th 990, 4 Cal. Rptr.3d 103, 75 P.3d 30, the plaintiff was a 14-year-old novice on a school swim team. She broke her neck during a meet when she executed a practice dive into a shallow racing pool located on school property. She sued the school district, alleging that the injury was caused in part by the failure of her coach, a district employee, to give her any instruction in how to safely dive into a shallow pool. She also sued the coach as an individual for failing to adequately supervise her and for insisting that she dive or risk dismissal. (Id. at p. 995, 4 Cal.Rptr.3d 103, 75 P.3d 30.) We applied the primary assumption of risk doctrine based on the coach's relationship to the sport. Although, the individual defendant was the swimmer's coach, rather than an active competitor, he had a direct relationship to the competition. [T]he relationship of a sports instructor or coach to a student or athlete is different from the relationship between coparticipants in a sport. But because a significant part of an instructor's or coach's role is to challenge or `push' a student or athlete to advance in his or her skill level and to undertake more difficult tasks, and because the fulfillment of such a role could be improperly chilled by too stringent a standard of potential legal liability, we conclude that the same general standard should apply in cases in which an instructor's alleged liability rests primarily on a claim that he or she challenged the player to perform beyond his or her capacity or failed to provide adequate instruction or supervision before directing or permitting a student to perform a particular maneuver that has resulted in injury to the student. A sports instructor may be found to have breached a duty of care to a student or athlete only if the instructor intentionally injures the student or engages in conduct that is reckless in the sense that it is `totally outside the range of the ordinary activity' [citation] involved in teaching or coaching the sport. ( Kahn, supra, 31 Cal.4th at p. 996, 4 Cal.Rptr.3d 103, 75 P.3d 30.) Applying that standard, we concluded the defendants' summary judgment motion was granted in error. We noted evidence of defendant coach's failure to provide plaintiff with training in shallow-water diving, his awareness of plaintiffs intense fear of diving into shallow water, his conduct in lulling plaintiff into a false sense of security by promising that she would not be required to dive at competitions, his last-minute breach of this promise in the heat of a competition, and his threat to remove her from competition or at least from the meet if she refused to dive. Plaintiffs evidence supports the conclusion that the maneuver of diving into a shallow racing pool, if not done correctly, poses a significant risk of extremely serious injury, and that there is a well-established mode of instruction for teaching a student to perform this maneuver safely. The declarations before the trial court raise a disputed issue of fact as to whether defendant coach provided any instruction at all to plaintiff with regard to the safe performance of such a maneuver, as well as to the existence and nature of the coach's promises and threats. Under these circumstances, the question whether the coach's conduct was reckless in that it fell totally outside the range of ordinary activity involved in teaching or coaching this sport cannot properly be resolved on summary judgment. ( Kahn, supra, 31 Cal.4th at pp. 996-997, 4 Cal.Rptr.3d 103, 75 P.3d 30.) Avila, supra, 38 Cal.4th 148, 41 Cal. Rptr.3d 299, 131 P.3d 383, involved intercollegiate baseball. A pitcher on the Rio Hondo Community College team (Rio Hondo) hit a batter on the Citrus Community College team (Citrus). The next inning the Citrus pitcher allegedly retaliated by hitting a Rio Hondo batter with a beanball. The Rio Hondo player sued the Citrus Community College District for negligence. We held the suit was barred by the primary assumption of risk doctrine. [4] It is against the rules of baseball to intentionally throw at a batter. (Id. at p. 165, 41 Cal.Rptr.3d 299, 131 P.3d 383.) Nevertheless, being intentionally thrown at is a fundamental part and inherent risk of the sport of baseball. It is not the function of tort law to police such conduct. (Ibid., fn. omitted.) Plaintiff urges us to repudiate the primary assumption of risk doctrine. He relies upon arguments made against it by the authors of the separate opinions in Knight, supra, 3 Cal.4th 296, 321-338, 11 Cal. Rptr.2d 2, 834 P.2d 696. Continuing to find those arguments unpersuasive, we reaffirm the doctrine, as we did in Cheong, supra, 16 Cal.4th 1063, 1067, 68 Cal. Rptr.2d 859, 946 P.2d 817, Kahn, supra, 31 Cal.4th 990, 1005, footnote 2, 4 Cal.Rptr.3d 103, 75 P.3d 30, and Avila, supra, 38 Cal.4th 148, 160-165, 41 Cal.Rptr.3d 299, 131 P.3d 383.