Transfer Tools
February 7, 2014
On Oct. 15 I used this space to talk about “Transfer Trends”; and I took that topic on the road, including it in MHSAA Update meetings throughout the state. I described an “epidemic.”
As I have said and written before (including in this space on Sept. 27, 2011), our transfer regulation is an inadequate tool for the fight ahead of us. It has failed to slow the growth of athletic-motivated transfers even after adoption of a rule for that purpose in 1997. Too few schools have wanted the hassle of alleging and documenting that a transfer was primarily for athletic reasons. In 2012, the leadership of the basketball and wrestling coaches associations, observing that current rules permitted several high-profile transfers in their sports, asked for a much tougher transfer rule – one that would subject most transfer students to a full year of ineligibility. Recognizing its legal responsibility to enforce the most narrow proscriptions possible, the Representative Council responded with more precision.
The new athletic-related transfer rule adopted last May extends the period of ineligibility from one semester to two for those students whose circumstances do not fit one of the existing 15 exceptions to the transfer regulation and where the student has engaged in certain activities during the previous 12 months that link the student to the new school’s athletic program.
If a student played high school sports during the previous 12 months and did one of the activities that linked that student to the new school athletically, the new rule doubles the period of ineligibility. If, for example, this transfer student attended an open gym at the new school, played summer or non-school sports on a team coached by one of the coaches of the sport at the new school, or received instruction in strength or conditioning from a personal trainer who coaches at the new school, then the period of ineligibility would double.
In addition to narrowly tailoring the new rule to the most obvious and egregious examples of an athletic-motivated or -related transfer, the Representative Council also provided necessary notice. The rule has not been “sprung” on students who may have done things before the rule change that would have made them ineligible. Because the rule has a 12-month run-up to consider, the Council provided almost 15 months’ notice. The rule takes full effect Aug. 1, 2014.
This is another example of defining a problem and designing the policy with precision. It’s both most educationally sound and judicially defensible.
Guarding Secrets
February 8, 2013
January was a bad month for some sports heroes, but it was an instructional time for those who paused to connect some dots.
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Two of Major League Baseball’s most prolific performers became eligible for baseball’s Hall of Fame, but we learned in January that neither came close to earning enough votes for election to that prestigious shrine. Each has seen his star-power descend in a cloud of legal problems surrounding his suspected use of performance enhancing drugs.
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After seven Tour de France titles and seven times seven denials of using performance enhancing drugs and various blood doping techniques, Lance Armstrong “came clean.” Sort of.
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A Heisman Trophy candidate went from a broken-hearted soul mate to the victim of a cruel hoax to a contributor to the weirdest story college sports has witnessed. From duped to duplicitous.
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And all this with Penn State’s scandal still fresh in our minds.
How fatiguing it must be and, ultimately, how futile it is to try to keep secrets. That’s always been true; it’s just more obvious in a world where everyone’s access to social media renders investigative journalism too little and too late in uncovering the secrets that heroes harbor.
How any of these people ever thought they could guard their secrets beyond the grave would be beyond belief if it just didn’t keep happening so often. There must be something we’re doing wrong in the upbringing of prominent athletes (like too many politicians) that makes them think they can get away with sordid secrets . . . that they’re too big to fail.
The truth is, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. No secret is beyond discovery.