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.
Committees Fail Critical Issues
June 7, 2013
Typically, each sport committee meets once each year for three to five hours, during which time it considers proposals that come from schools, leagues and the state’s coaches association for the sport; and the proposals most often deal with allowing more regular-season events and more qualifiers to the MHSAA postseason tournament.
Occasionally there is a proposal that might improve sportsmanship. But much more often the proposals would increase conflicts between academics and athletics and/or strain overstressed local budgets. And almost never is there a proposal that would address the health and safety of participants (the Wrestling Committee has been an occasional exception and the Competitive Cheer Committee is a routine exception).
While coaches associations must shoulder some of the blame because they’ve brought MHSAA committees “trivial” topics, at least in comparison to the tougher health and safety topics, much of the cause of MHSAA committee ineffectiveness is that the committees don’t meet long enough or often enough to research serious problems and develop well-thought-out solutions. That is forgivable because it is difficult to get commitments from busy people all across Michigan to be absent from their regular jobs and travel dozens or even hundreds of miles, and to do so multiple times each year – which is what it takes to more fully understand complex problems and more carefully construct solutions. Meetings have to be few and they have to be efficient.
However, facing the worst publicity football has seen since the mid-1970s, we knew we had to supplement the football committee process. We did so by appointing a special Football Task Force of optimum size and experienced, representative makeup to meet on however many occasions are necessary during 2013 to accomplish three purposes:
- Review practice policies to improve acclimatization of players and reduce head trauma.
- Review competition rules to reduce head trauma and the frequency of the sport’s most injurious game situations.
- Develop promotions that extol the value of football to students, schools and communities and the safety record of school-based football.
The promotional efforts have begun to be rolled out; game rule modifications are being investigated; and four proposals for changing football practice policies have been prepared. They will be the topic of our next posting.