Transfer Culture
March 14, 2017
It is rare when a problem of major college athletics doesn’t eventually become a pollutant of high school athletics. A current issue demonstrates the point.
In 2015, NCAA research reported that about 40 percent of Division I men’s basketball players who had entered an NCAA institution directly from high school as freshmen had departed that institution by the end of their sophomore year.
Approximately 44 percent of the transfers were to other Division I programs, 33 percent to Division II programs, one percent to Division III, and 23 percent to non-NCAA colleges. Nearly 90 percent of all transfers said they changed schools for athletic reasons.
At the 2016 Men’s Final Four, NCAA President Mark Emmert stated that the issue of transfers is one of the most hotly debated in NCAA men’s basketball and football.
The culture that contributes to this is created in youth programs, starting even before students reach high school. There are no rules that govern players’ change from one non-school team to another, year after year. Players, parents and handlers talk with each other about where players can find the coach or team that will give them the best shot for a college scholarship or to fulfill their dreams of a professional career; and they will drive any distance from their homes to connect with that non-school team or coach.
This culture has infected high school sports, as witnessed by what appears to be increasing numbers of students who change schools for reasons more related to their non-school contacts and their college dreams than their high school experience, either athletic or academic.
These pressures will only increase under the current model of major college sports that treats superior athletes as if they were superior human beings and lavishes publicity and perks upon them. Until the major college sports experience is disincentivised, those colleges will have transfer troubles. And so will we.
Standards Promote Value
October 29, 2012
I can’t speak for every state, but it is probably true for most states, that (1) no school is required to provide a program of interscholastic activities – such are not curricular activities; and (2) participation in voluntary interscholastic competitive activities is a privilege offered to those who meet standards of eligibility and conduct of the school and standards of ability for the activity involved.
It is not a liability but an asset of competitive interscholastic activities that they are not co-curricular, but extracurricular – voluntary programs with extra standards, extra requirements, extra expectations.
We don’t need to sell the public on the value of participation; they desperately want their children to participate, and they will even sue us for the opportunity. What we have to do is sell the public on the value of the standards we maintain for participation.
Much of the value of school activities results from the standards of school activities. Many of the benefits of school activities accrue from the requirements of school activities. Raise the bar, raise the value. Lower the bar, lower the value.
Activities are much less capable of doing good things for kids and good things for schools and their communities where there are lower standards of eligibility and conduct. It’s the difference between interscholastic and intramural, between tough and easy. It is because schools have raised the bar for interscholastic activities that these programs have value to students, schools and communities.