Baseball Coach Steve Mandl Suspended Before a Hearing Is Held One more time, at the end of another high school championship baseball game, Steve Mandl was floating around a ballpark, perched on the shoulders of whooping players last June. He had taken this victory ride before: In 27 years, Mr. Mandl, the coach of the George Washington High School baseball team in Washington Heights, had led his squads to 26 city championships. But last season, the players had to climb into the stands and pull him out. Mr. Mandl was not on the field because he had been suspended by the Public School Athletic League on the complaint of a rival coach who charged that Mr. Mandl had tried to recruit a young star, a violation of a rule that says a coach may not "induce any student" to transfer schools for sports. "Never happened," Mr. Mandl said this week. I had nothing to do with it. The young ballplayer, Fernelys Sanchez, has also said that Mr. Mandl was not involved in his request to transfer to George Washington from Lehman High School in the Bronx. His family had moved to Inwood, a few minutes from George Washington, and Lehman was nearly an hour-and-a-half commute. Mr. Mandl, who kept his job as a gym teacher, is back in uniform and leading his team through workouts once again, though the charges against him remain unresolved. The steps needed to discipline and fire teachers in the New York City schools are much in the news these days, with both the mayor and the governor insisting that they must be changed. There are grim examples of teachers lingering for years in a bureaucratic purgatory while the union and management debate accusations of incompetence, or unsuitable behavior with children. The Mandl case offers another perspective: the possibility that petty, meritless charges can get traction and turn the disciplinary process itself into a form of punishment long before a verdict has been reached. A few days before preseason workouts were to begin last February, Mr. Mandl was told by the principal that he had been suspended for a year by the league. No hearing had been held. Mr. Mandl immediately called the league and said he wanted to appeal, and was told to attend an arbitration session in a few weeks. When he arrived, he said, the arbitrator seemed puzzled as to why Mr. Mandl was even there. The arbitrator asked for a few minutes to make a phone call to gather information about the case, then returned to tell the coach that it was too soon for him to appeal. After all, he had never been given an initial hearing. In due course, the initial hearing was held, presided over by the league official who had suspended him. There were no witnesses, only a report compiled by an "investigator" for the league, a former high school baseball coach who had clashed with Mr. Mandl in the past. The investigator never spoke with the boy or his mother, who had requested the transfer. "They told me that they would issue a decision in 48 hours," Mr. Mandl said. Their decision, of course, whenever it came, would be a formality. As the weeks of the season were spinning by, Mr. Mandl did not wait for the decision. He hired lawyers to go to court and ask a judge to issue an injunction against the suspension until a semblance of fairness was introduced to the proceedings. The judge was sympathetic but said that Mr. Mandl had to exhaust the administrative appeals. At that moment, though, the administrative process halted without explanation. "All of a sudden, the P.S.A.L. hit the brakes," said Ken Ross, a lawyer and friend of Mr. Mandl. A spokesman for the Department of Education said that nothing unusual had happened in the Mandl case. "He has a right to appeal, and that process is governed by our long-standing contractual agreement with the union," the spokeswoman, Margie Feinberg, said. The decision that was supposed to be announced in 48 hours did not come out until six weeks later, in the final days of the season. The league president ratified the suspension he had already imposed on Mr. Mandl. The coach returned to court, and about 30 players and their families filled the benches. It was too late. He would sit in the stands for the championship. He awaits a date for an arbitrator to hear the evidence. As for the new season, he is sure that it will be happier. "And I'm going to have a better seat," he said. E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com Twitter: @jimdwyernyt