EAST LANSING — A result years in the making finally came to fruition on Wednesday for players, parents and fans of high school soccer in the Upper Peninsula.

The U.S. federal court for the Western District of Michigan — the same district that the Marquette court is based in — out of its headquarters location in Grand Rapids granted a petition to adjust U.P. seasons to align with the Lower Peninsula.

That allows U.P. teams for the first time in about 15 years to play in Michigan High School Athletic Association postseason tournaments, according to an MHSAA news release authored by MHSAA.com senior editor Geoff Kimmerly.

A joint petition filed by the MHSAA and Communities for Equity asked for the change to be made to a litigation compliance plan originally agreed upon more than a decade ago that made sweeping changes to high school sports seasons that the MHSAA has jurisdiction over.

Part of that plan assigned U.P. boys and girls soccer seasons to be the opposite of what Lower Peninsula teams played. With just a small handful of teams playing in the U.P., the MHSAA only sponsored a tourney for teams south of the Mackinac Bridge.

Lower Peninsula schools have always played what is the traditional seasons for the sports — boys in the fall and girls in the spring. The compliance plan put U.P. girls soccer in the fall and boys in the spring.

U.P. schools then had to make a decision whether to follow the court compliance plan and offer the sport out of season from nearly every other area they could play — downstate Michigan and throughout Wisconsin — or go out of season.

Going out of season would make the sport illegitimate as an MHSAA sport, as outlined in the court-ordered plan, but offered the chance for a wide-ranging set of opponents outside the U.P.

With just a small handful of schools playing either boys, girls or both genders of soccer in the U.P., it was obvious the U.P. schools needed to play the boys sport in the fall and girls in the spring to find enough opponents when this court order took effect for the 2007-08 season.

That’s the way high school soccer has been played ever since in the U.P. Marquette has been the dominant school in the sport that has only attracted a few other schools — in particular Iron Mountain, Kingsford, Sault Ste. Marie, Houghton, Ironwood and Big Bay de Noc by the latest count.

Except for several years around the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, Marquette has hosted a U.P. Finals tournament on its own following both the boys fall season and girls spring season outside the sponsorship of the MHSAA. Marquette has also won all or virtually all the titles in both boys and girls tournaments.

The lawsuit that led to the compliance plan making sweeping changes to Michigan high school sports seasons was originally filed in the late 1990s by Communities for Equity, which was led by parents of Lower Peninsula high school volleyball players who felt that offering volleyball in the fall while nearly every other state offered it in the winter hurt their daughters’ chances to play in college.

While Michigan high school boys sports such as football and basketball played at times consistent with the rest of the country, two of the major girls sports were played at times opposed to the rest of the country — girls basketball in the fall and volleyball in the winter.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, the case was made by the U.P. Athletic Committee made up of athletic directors from U.P. schools and the MHSAA to allow the U.P. to officially switch to the Lower Peninsula set of seasons for soccer.

Communities for Equity eventually agreed and a federal judge in the Western District was approached about it.

“The decision came about much sooner than most of us expected,” said Marquette Area Public School AD Alex Tiseo, who is a member of the U.P. Athletic Committee and has also served two terms on the MHSAA’s statewide Representative Council.

Tiseo and the MHSAA noted that the judge’s ruling can take effect immediately, meaning that Marquette and other soccer-playing high schools will be eligible to play in this fall’s MHSAA boys tournament, along with next spring’s MHSAA girls tournament.

The MHSAA cited numbers of 13,221 boys and 11,921 girls playing on high school soccer teams during the 2022-23 school year.

Tiseo sees the potential for more U.P. schools — maybe up to twice as many as currently — picking up the sport.

“It may take a few years, but I can see being able to play in the MHSAA tournament as an incentive for schools to add the sport,” said Tiseo, himself an MSHS boys soccer player in his student days in the early 2000s just a few years before the court order changed the seasons around.

“This is great news for our member schools, especially those soccer programs in our Upper Peninsula,” MHSAA Executive Director Mark Uyl said in the MHSAA news release. “We appreciate the partnership on this issue with Communities for Equity, in particular President Diane Madsen, working together in a spirit of cooperation and common sense in making this positive change for soccer players in our state.”

Though the MHSAA website didn’t show it on Friday afternoon, Tiseo expected Marquette to be placed in Division 2 among the four divisions of boys soccer this fall for the postseason tournament. The Division 2 district that makes the most sense geographically for MSHS is District 32, which includes Petoskey, Alpena, Gaylord, Midland, Bay City Central, Bay City Western and Bay City John Glenn.

“Though our schedule is set for this fall, I can see there being extra motivation to try scheduling teams from our district during the regular season,” Tiseo said.