This is an opinion column.

The Alabama High School Athletic Association (AHSAA) adopted a new rule last week, allowing member schools to request religious accommodations for championship play beginning in the 2023-24 school year. The policy adjustment is the byproduct of a question that arose when Huntsville’s Oakwood Academy, a Seventh Day Adventist School, advanced in last year’s high school regional basketball playoffs. The AHSAA sets brackets for post-season play and scheduled Oakwood to compete at 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon.

Seventh Day Adventists observe the Sabbath from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. It is their sincerely-held religious belief that this block of time should be set apart by disengaging from work and other activities and focusing on the worship of God.

In Oakwood’s particular case, accommodation would have been easy to achieve. There was another regional game scheduled for 7:30 pm on Saturday–a timeslot that presented no religious conflict for the school–and all four teams involved were willing to swap game times. Still, the association declined to approve the change, and the Oakwood team forfeited rather than violate their conscience. Eventually, the school filed a lawsuit asserting that the association violated their religious rights.

While I don’t share the Seventh Day Adventists’ understanding of which day of the week to set aside as the Sabbath, I respect their commitment to Sabbath-keeping. I’ve written about how modern Christians have allowed the world and all of its distractions–with youth sports being a growing perpetrator–to infringe upon a spiritual discipline so essential it’s one of the Ten Commandments.

It seems the AHSAA realized that providing accommodations in the limited number of games where religious conflicts may exist is both achievable and reasonable. (I’m sure pending litigation helped them reach clarity on this point.) In the case of Seventh Day Adventists and observant Jewish student-athletes, the sundown to sundown Sabbath concept leaves portions of Friday and Saturday still available for competition. If a playoff round is on a Friday, such a team could play earlier in the day. If a round of competition is on Saturday, they might play after sundown.

It’s a shame that the kids from Oakwood had to sacrifice the opportunity to compete and perhaps advance in the 2022 playoffs to spotlight this religious liberty issue. But their sacrifice was not in vain. It brought about a needed rule change and sparked some conversation about how we define and observe the Sabbath in our various faiths and what we should do to protect religious liberty in a pluralistic society.

This change, which the governor characterized as a “win for religious liberty,” is just that and has value for faithful Alabamians beyond the Seventh Day Adventist community. As our culture continues a trend toward rapid secularization, we will likely see institutions that we depend upon and value, like the AHSAA, wrestle with questions like these with increasing regularity. While the AHSAA is a private agency, it acts as a quasi-public entity in our state, exercising great influence over the lives of member schools, their student-athletes, and the communities that support them.

I love sports at all levels, and high school sports may be my favorite because the competition on that level is so pure. The local high school team is a focal point of identity in many communities, especially in the smaller towns of rural Alabama.

But I also believe that we must rightly order our loves. Faith practices fortify our lives in ways that even the community created by high school sports can not. The new rule adopted by the AHSAA enables schools from various faith practices to keep athletics in its proper place in the hierarchy of life while maintaining the right to compete.

Dana Hall McCain writes about public policy, faith, and culture for AL.com. Follow her on Twitter @dhmccain for takes on these topics and unregulated anxiety related to Auburn football.