High School Wrestling Suspension Reinstated by Wisconsin Supreme Court

The state high court also vacated court of appeals ruling that the WIAA is a state actor.

Sometimes court decisions are more significant for the issues they do not reach, and that was the case in the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Halter v. Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association, 2025 WI 10. On a petition for a writ of certiorari challenging the WIAA’s decision to suspend a wrestler, the supreme court sidestepped the question of whether certiorari review was available in this context, and it declined to opine on whether the WIAA qualifies as a state actor. Instead, the court held that, on the facts presented, the WIAA’s suspension was a reasonable application of its rules and called it a day.

During the 2018-2019 high school wrestling season, then-sophomore wrestler Hayden Halter received two unsportsmanlike conduct penalties during his last regular-season match (the first for cursing at an official and the second for flexing at the opposing crowd). As a consequence, Halter was ejected and faced a one-match suspension. This posed a problem for Halter because his next scheduled match was regionals, and if he missed regionals, he could not advance to state, where he hoped to defend the state title he earned as a freshman.

The WIAA’s applicable suspension rule says, “A student, disqualified from a contest for flagrant or unsportsmanlike conduct, is suspended from interscholastic competition for no less than the next competitive event (but not less than one complete game or meet).” In an effort to skirt this rule, Halter’s coaches entered him in a junior varsity wrestling meet scheduled to take place before regionals. Halter—who had never competed at the JV level before—sat out the JV event and claimed that in doing so, he had served his suspension. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the WIAA disagreed and prohibited Halter from competing at regionals.

Rather than quietly ending his sophomore wrestling campaign, Halter sued. The circuit court promptly issued a temporary restraining order enjoining the WIAA from enforcing the suspension. The TRO allowed Halter to compete at regionals, advance to state, and ultimately win his second state title. Two years of litigation and a full trial later, the circuit court held in WIAA’s favor and dismissed the case, stripping Halter of his state title. On appeal, District II reinstated Halter’s title, ruling that the WIAA was a state actor and that it unreasonably applied its suspension rule. As readers may recall, I flagged a few issues in the court of appeals’ decision that I thought might prompt the supreme court to take the case, which it ultimately did.

There were three questions before the supreme court. The first question—and the only one squarely presented—was whether WIAA’s application of its suspension rule was reasonable under the deferential certiorari review standard. The second question was whether certiorari review is even available in the context of a non-public entity like the WIAA. And the third question was whether the WIAA is a “state actor” as the court of appeals held.

In a 5-2 decision authored by Justice Hagedorn, the supreme court held that Halter was not entitled to a writ of certiorari. In the certiorari context, courts conduct a limited review, inquiring whether a decisionmaker (1) stayed within its jurisdiction; (2) acted according to a correct theory of law; (3) acted arbitrarily, oppressively, or unreasonably; and (4) made a reasonable determination based on the available evidence. Here, Halter’s arguments focused on the third inquiry: whether the WIAA acted arbitrarily or unreasonably by refusing to allow him to serve his suspension at the JV level.

The majority had little trouble holding that the WIAA reasonably required Halter to serve his suspension at the varsity level. It explained, “Even if the Halters’ reading is possible, we conclude WIAA’s interpretation was—at the very least—reasonable given the purpose of the Rule, the WIAA’s published guidance on its interpretation, and the evidence showing how others understood it.” The court went on:

To say it another way, given the narrow role for this court in certiorari review, we are not concerned with the best way to read the Rule. We are concerned only with whether the WIAA’s approach was reasonable, and not arbitrary. And it clearly was.

Candidly, it was the two issues the court did not address that piqued my interest most. In my post on the court of appeals’ decision in this case, I expressed concern that certiorari was an “uneasy fit” in this context because the WIAA is not a government agency and lacks an official jurisdiction. But curiously, the WIAA did not advance this argument during any stage of this case until oral argument at the supreme court. As such, the majority declined to take up the issue. But that didn’t stop Justice Protasiewicz from filing an insightful—and I think correct—concurrence arguing that “the law does not support certiorari review for decisions of the WIAA, a private organization governed by contract.”

The other interesting angle to this case was the court of appeals’ holding that the WIAA is a state actor. There’s some U.S. Supreme Court precedent for the proposition that a private high school athletics organization may be treated as a state actor in certain circumstances.¹ In this case, the court of appeals treated the state actor question as a necessary threshold inquiry to its certiorari analysis and held that the WIAA’s effective monopoly over high school athletics rendered it a state actor. The supreme court vacated that holding, explaining it was “unconvinced this is a threshold inquiry for Halter’s certiorari claim.” The court observed that the state actor doctrine is one of federal constitutional law, yet Halter advanced no federal constitutional law claims. Because his claims were entirely based on state law, the state actor question was irrelevant.

Chief Justice Ziegler, joined by Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley, filed what amounts to a non-dissent dissent. It did not note any disagreement with the majority opinion’s analysis. Instead, it argued that the court engaged in “routine error correction” and that the case should have been dismissed as improvidently granted. (If I had to guess, the majority would have been none too comfortable leaving in place the court of appeals’ holding that the WIAA is a state actor.)

The WIAA will likely be back at the supreme court before long. A lawsuit currently pending in Sauk County presents both the state actor and certiorari questions that the court sidestepped in this case.

1. See Brentwood Acad. v. Tennessee Secondary Schs. Athletic Ass’n, 531 U.S. 288 (2001).