MOBILE — A parent has gone to court seeking an order that would let a Mary G. Montgomery High School football player who was ruled ineligible in May return to the field this season.
Tameka Dale, acting on behalf of her son, filed a request for a temporary injunction against the Alabama High School Athletic Association and its executive director, Heath Harmon. The filing was made in Montgomery County Circuit Court this week.
The student is a minor and is identified in the case only as “T.D.” The filing asks that he be allowed to play again and that the school not face further penalties for playing him.
Harmon, through AHSAA director of communications Scott Griffin, said the association does not comment on ongoing legal matters.
What a Temporary Injunction Asks For
The request is for emergency relief, and the difference between that and an ordinary lawsuit matters to how quickly — and on what basis — a judge can act.
A temporary restraining order is the most immediate form of court intervention. It is short-lived by design, meant only to hold a situation in place until the court can hold a hearing. A preliminary or temporary injunction is the next step: it follows notice to the other side and a hearing, and it can last until the case is resolved on the merits.
To obtain that relief in Alabama, a party generally has to make a four-part showing: that without an injunction it would suffer irreparable injury; that there is no adequate remedy at law — meaning money damages would not fix the problem; that it has a reasonable likelihood of succeeding on the merits of the case; and that the hardship the injunction would impose on the other side is not unreasonably disproportionate to the benefit gained.
The irreparable-injury element is why athletic eligibility cases so often arrive as injunction requests. A season that has already been played cannot be given back, and a court that waits to decide the underlying legal question until after the final game has effectively decided it against the player regardless of who was right. Courts issuing injunctions may also require the party seeking one to post security to cover damages if the injunction is later found to have been wrongly granted.
Importantly, an injunction is not a ruling that the plaintiff wins. It is a judgment that the balance of harms and the strength of the claim justify preserving a position while the case proceeds.
The Penalties That Made T.D. Ineligible
In May, the AHSAA announced that Mary G. Montgomery’s football program would be placed on restrictive probation for violating the association’s recruiting rules. The penalties included a postseason ban for the team in 2026 and a one-year suspension for then-head coach Zach Golson.
As part of the sanctions, any students identified as being involved in the violations were deemed ineligible to participate in athletics at Mary G. Montgomery.
The school’s self-report to the AHSAA has not been publicly released. According to the account in court filings and prior reporting, the penalties centered on a Signing Day party held at the school for rising ninth-graders, some of whom were enrolled in middle schools not zoned for Mary G. Montgomery.
The lawsuit states that T.D. was the only student named in the AHSAA’s infractions letter who has remained at Mary G. Montgomery. The suit offers that fact as evidence that his interest in attending the school was not driven by the chance to play athletics.
The Account in the Filing
According to the suit, Dale went to Mary G. Montgomery on May 7, 2025, to complete paperwork enrolling her son at the school. The filing states he was then an eighth-grade honor student and was zoned to attend a different high school the following year, and that his mother wanted him at a school where she believed his educational opportunities were better.
While at the school to enroll him, the suit says, Dale learned that a Signing Day event would be held the next day and attended it, speaking there with coaches, administrators and counselors about the school’s expectations for her son as a student and an athlete.
“At no time did any coach, booster or otherwise ‘go between’ for MGM High School recruit ‘T.D.’ to the school for the purpose of participating in varsity athletics,” the suit states, adding that at the time of the visit the student had already chosen the school and completed the required enrollment paperwork for the fall of 2025.
The complaint says the AHSAA nonetheless ruled him ineligible on the ground that his attendance at the 2025 Signing Day party constituted recruitment.
The Argument Over the Recruiting Rule
The central legal argument in the filing is not about whether the events happened. It is about whether the rule applied to them was validly adopted.
The complaint contends the AHSAA lacks the authority to enforce portions of its recruiting rule because changes or additions to that rule were made without approval by the association’s own legislative council.
“I have discovered the AHSAA has amended the recruiting rule without following the proper procedure as required by their bylaws,” said Michael Kidd, an attorney for Dale. “They just inserted language they wanted to add to the rule, and it never went through the process as outlined in their by-laws. It’s the added verbiage that they used to make my client ineligible. They demand compliance of a rule that they failed to approve as required by their own bylaws.”
Kidd contends the disputed language is a note appended to an AHSAA recruiting rule reading: “Any contact/communication with a student, student’s parents, or any other family member (including elementary students) enrolled in another school, regardless of school zone, including, but not limited to, phone calls, emails, texts, social media, etc., is prohibited.”
The AHSAA has not responded to that contention publicly, citing its practice of not commenting on pending litigation.
Why the Bylaws Argument Is the One Being Pressed
The framing of the claim reflects a long-standing limit on how far courts will go in reviewing decisions by organizations like the AHSAA.
The association is a voluntary membership organization of schools rather than a state agency. Courts have generally been reluctant to substitute their judgment for that of a voluntary association on internal matters — how it interprets its rules, how it weighs evidence, what penalty it imposes. The recognized exceptions are narrow: courts will intervene where an association acted fraudulently, exceeded the authority it actually has, or failed to follow its own governing rules or provide the process those rules require.
A claim that a rule was never validly adopted fits inside one of those exceptions. Rather than asking a judge to second-guess how the AHSAA read the facts, it asks whether the specific language used to declare the student ineligible was ever properly enacted. That is a question about the association’s compliance with its own bylaws, which is territory courts have historically been willing to enter.
The AHSAA’s Filing
Harmon and the AHSAA have filed a motion to dismiss the case, citing a lack of jurisdiction and the association’s internal autonomy. They argue the court should not interfere with AHSAA operations.
That is the mirror image of the plaintiff’s argument — an assertion that this dispute falls within the zone of internal decision-making courts leave alone, rather than within the exception for an association that departed from its own rules.
Kidd said the court gave him until Tuesday to file an additional brief arguing his position, after which he expects AHSAA attorneys to have a couple of days to respond.
“Then I assume we will have a hearing on whether to issue the injunction,” Kidd said.
A Cluster of Cases
The filing is the third lawsuit brought against the AHSAA since the previous Friday.
Earlier in the week, a judge issued an order allowing a Prattville High School student — previously determined to be homeless and ruled ineligible by the AHSAA — to play for at least two weeks. Golson, the suspended Mary G. Montgomery coach, filed his own suit against the AHSAA and others the prior week, seeking reinstatement, due process, or both.
Eligibility rules exist to keep competition between member schools from turning into a recruiting market, and enforcement decisions in individual cases are where the general rule meets a specific family’s circumstances. Litigation over those decisions is not new; what stands out here is the concentration of filings in a short period.
Where the Team Stands
Mary G. Montgomery opened the season with two straight losses. The Vikings host Robertsdale in their Class 6A, Region 1 opener, though under the AHSAA penalties their games will not count in the region standings this year.
Last week, the AHSAA’s Central Board of Control upheld the school’s restrictive probation after an appeal by Mary G. Montgomery officials — exhausting the association’s internal appeal route and leaving the courts as the remaining forum.