Court Opinion

ID: 9788279
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 00:36:25.552647+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:37:07.106146
License: Public Domain

OPALA, J.,
with whom TAYLOR, V.C.J. and WINCHESTER, J., join, concurring
T1 At issue here is the correctness of the trial court's action by temporarily enjoining the defendant (a school association) from enforcing against a high school student athlete its rule under whose terms the athlete became ineligible to play on the Sallisaw High School's basketball team.
*3672 The legal propriety of a district court decision that either sustains or sets aside a ruling by a voluntary school association is reviewed in an appellate court by applying the standard most recently announced in Brown v. Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Assn., 2005 OK 88, 125 P.3d, 1219. Absent fraudulent collusive, unreasonable, arbitrary or capricious decisional process, a court may not overturn a voluntary association's enforcement of its rules. Concluding from its review of the record that the association's ruling in contest does not offend the prohibited norms of decisional behavior, the court reverses the trial court's temporary injunction as an impermissible interference with the association's freedom of action. While I coneur in today's disposition and in the court's pronouncement, I write separately to add with emphasis that in their quest for relief the student athlete's parents neither rely on the association's use of any prohibited norms in its decisional process nor contest the association's legal status as a private (nongovernmental) entity in an effort to secure this court's re-examination of the trial judge's ruling under a more favorable standard of review than that which governs rulings by voluntary private school associations.