Practice was nearing completion when Abdur-Rahmaan Yaseen received a challenge.
Someone at Walled Lake Western wanted to try to cover the wide receiver who has committed to Northwestern.
The challenge came from Western coach Alex Grignon.
Grignon doesn’t want to talk about how effectively he did or did not defend Yaseen, and the coach is fortunate no video tape evidence is available to show why Yaseen is one of the best receivers in the state and Grignon is .. a coach.
The pity is that may be the only competition Yaseen sees this year.
Yaseen has been ruled ineligible by the Michigan High School Athletic Association, which says that according to his academic transcript he has exhausted his eligibility because he is in his fifth year as a high school student.
“I’m definitely not giving up hope,” Yaseen said. “I can’t say too much because I can’t control it. It’s not really my fault. It’s a mistake on parents and administrators.”
This is a complex case, and it goes back to 2010 when he was enrolled in the Michigan Connections Academy, an online school.
Before that, Yaseen had been home-schooled for three years, covering kindergarten and first and second grades. But that fall, Connections Academy erroneously listed him as a fourth grader, effectively double-promoting him, bypassing the third grade.
Nothing was made of it at the time and it never became an issue until recently.
It was a problem in the 2015-16 school year when Connections Academy listed all of Yaseen’s classes as ninth-grade classes, which, unbeknownst to his family, technically made him a high school student. He would not have been considered a ninth grader had over half of his classes been at the eighth-grade level.
“We considered him in the eighth grade,” said his father, Khalid Yaseen, who played football at Michigan and Stanford.
