A show of teamwork and camaraderie, or a rule-breaking display of unsportsmanlike conduct? That’s the question being raised following a pair of disqualifications this week at a local cross country meet.

On Tuesday, at the conclusion of a race in Buckley, junior Abraham Feeney and freshman Spencer McNitt (pictured), the top two runners on the Glen Lake Community Schools high school boys cross country team, joined hands to celebrate crossing the finish line together, both in a time of 16:23 for the 3.1-mile distance. According to a race recap written by Glen Lake head coach George Drown, that time “was a lifetime best for Spencer and a season best for Abraham,” and handily gave Feeney and McNitt the top two places in the race.

For a few moments, anyway.

Soon, a referee flagged Feeney and McNitt’s hand-holding as a rule violation, disqualifying both from the race.

“There is a rule in cross country that says kids can't hold hands,” Drown tells The Ticker. “Unfortunately, that rule is written just like that. With no explanation as to why it is a rule. The referee called it. I tried to appeal it, but was unsuccessful.”

The rule appears in the cross country rulebook authored by the National Federation of State High School Associations, the national body that serves all 51 state athletic associations. The rule states: “It is an unfair act when a competitor receives any assistance from any other person that could improve that competitor’s performance. Assistance includes… Competitors joining or grasping hands with each other during a race.”

Feeney and McNitt aren’t the first high school athletes to find out about the rule the hard way. In 2023, the statute sparked outrage in Idaho when teammates at Rocky Mountain High School in Boise were disqualified from a state-qualifying meet for joining hands as they crossed the line at the end of a 3200-meter race. Each athlete – the former of whom was the state’s reigning 3200-meter champion – had to win an appeal to race the distance at the following week’s state championship, where they ultimately took the top two spots.

It’s not just high school cross country that has the rule, either: In 2019, a pair of pro British triathletes were disqualified from a World Triathlon Olympic Qualification event in Tokyo when they held hands in the closing moments of their neck-and-neck battle for first place.

At the Buckley meet, the disqualifications not only cost Feeney and McNitt their spots on the leaderboard, but were also enough to tip the scales against their team as a whole. The outcome led multiple readers to reach out to The Ticker, decrying the call as unfair and backwards – “When camaraderie and sportsmanship gets you disqualified,” read the title of one email – and “completely out of the spirit of the sport.”

The meet was the first “jamboree” of the season for the Northwest Conference – which Glen Lake belongs to alongside teams like Leland, Benzie Central, Buckley, Frankfort, Kingsley, Brethren, and Onekama. Cross country meets are scored based on the finishing positions of each team’s top five runners – first place gets one point, second place gets two points, and so on – with the lowest overall team score winning. The best-possible score, for a team whose top five runners take all top five spots, is 15.

Glen Lake’s placements on Tuesday netted the team a near-perfect score of 21 points, including Feeney and McNitt’s first and second-place finishes, as well as runners who finished fifth (freshman Christian Feeney, in 17:14), sixth (senior Liam McCaw, in 17:15), and seventh (junior Lincoln Bailey, in 17:18). Benzie Central, the second-place team, based on initial results, tallied 51 points, including third and fourth-place finishes from senior Jackson Schaub (16:39) and sophomore Eli VanPoortfliet (16:59).

After the disqualifications shook up the results, though, Glen Lake’s decisive win over Benzie Central morphed into a runner-up finish, with Benzie taking the meet with 37 points, 10 points ahead of Glen Lake.

“Certainly a tough moment for our boys team, but we will be stronger for it,” Drown wrote in his recap. “We are not going to let it diminish the six lifetime PRs [personal records] and three season bests that came out of the race. Our team knows who the real winner was and will get two more opportunities [at future conference jamborees] to prove it down the stretch.”

Despite the disappointment, Drown believes the results underline the depth and talent of this year’s Glen Lake team. Of the top 10 times ever run by Glen Lake runners, five belong to this season’s varsity top five, and three were recorded at Tuesday’s jamboree. Glen Lake is also ranked by the MHSAA as the top boys cross country team in the state in Division 4 – ahead of Hillsdale Academy, which has won three of the last four state championship titles in that division.

Glen Lake has never won a state title in boys cross country, but got on the podium last fall, finishing third.