Teaming Up
February 21, 2012
Try as I might, and no matter how much I practiced, I never became comfortable going to my left as a high school basketball player. I feel the same way about some of this job I have today.
If I’m asked a question about student eligibility, my response is usually quick and confident. The topic is in my wheelhouse, my comfort zone, my right hand.
But when I need to make a decision about information technology, a subject that didn’t exist when I started in this work, I need much more time and I’m more tentative with my answers. And it feels like I’m dribbling with my left hand.
Unfortunately, as time goes by, I’m faced with more questions that are in my area of weakness than my area of strength. It’s just the way the world works today, with everything tied into or revolving around technology.
Fortunately, we’ve assembled a team at the MHSAA office that includes staff for whom technology is not a thing. It just is. Like the air they breathe. They are as instinctive with their advice about technology as I am about the transfer rule.
Gratefully, there’s room for both of us in a modern enterprise serving traditional values.
Thinking of Don Quixote
October 10, 2017
The athletic transfer problem is not confined to high schools alone. Recently, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has had a work group studying the NCAA transfer rule for Division I institutions.
The problem has been of particular concern in Division I men’s basketball where more than 20 percent of scholarship players changed schools between last season and this.
The work group appeared to have narrowed its study to two options: Make every transfer student ineligible for one year; OR, Allow every transfer student immediate eligibility. And the second option seemed to have had the early momentum.
But last Wednesday, the work group announced that the proposal to grant immediate eligibility to transfer students who meet certain academic standards will not advance during the current NCAA legislative cycle. Two days later the report was corrected: there's still a chance for change by 2018-19.
Major college conference commissioners and NCAA leadership have surveyed the landscape. They see athletes arriving on their college campuses from an environment where, if they weren’t happy with a team, they changed teams.
Apparently, the non-school, travel team attitude is bigger than the NCAA may want to battle.
Yet here we are, thinking of how to wage war on athletic transfers in high schools.