A Backhanded Compliment
April 17, 2012
A year ago this month I listened to the attorney for another statewide high school athletic association pose this question: “Why is it that people quite readily accept inflexible age limitations over a broad spectrum of American life, including sports, but presuppose it is wrong for school sports?”
This attorney was in the middle of a controversy that more recently has visited the MHSAA: an overage student seeking relief from a universally applied maximum age rule. The speaker was perplexed and frustrated by the double standard.
Part of the reason for the double standard rests in the reality that people value the school sports experience so much more than other parts of life, including other sports experiences. Because they want the opportunity to play, they resort to litigation in an attempt to create the right to play.
Another part of the reason school sports is challenged on an issue on which other programs get a free pass is that school sports has a centralized authority, close to home. State high school associations are readily accessible targets, easier both to find and to fight with than most other entities with age restrictions.
And, of course, part of the reason for the double standard is the proximity of interscholastic athletics to academics – the former extracurricular, the latter curricular – the former a privilege for most teenagers, the latter a right of all citizens to age 26.
The reasons school sports are attacked on this issue while other entities are not are reasons really complimentary to school sports: the program is popular, accessible and connected to education. None of these features of school sports, or its age limitation, should change.
Tracking the Transfer Rule
September 19, 2017
We are not the first generation of school leaders to be concerned about athletic transfers in secondary school sports.
Lewis L. Forsythe, in his 1950 book Athletics in Michigan High Schools, described his era and earlier this way: “... there were enough who transferred for advantage, as they thought, in athletic opportunities to give wide currency to the term ‘tramp athletes.’ These were usually students who became ineligible in schools in which they had first enrolled, or became otherwise disaffected in their home situation and went elsewhere to continue school. It was possible, for example, for a boy to play football at Ann Arbor one season, drop out of school until the next March first, and then enter Jackson High school. Here he could make himself eligible for baseball and track by merely ‘passing’ in ten hours (later twelve hours) of work from time to time according to the reporting methods of the school, and then leave without taking final examinations. The next semester he might enroll in Detroit High School, and, by satisfying eligibility requirements for the current semester, play football in that school. With no age limit and no required check-up on eligibility in another school, this could go on for at least five years.”
Mr. Forsythe, writing in 1950, cited concerns as early as 1901, which led the state athletic committee to adopt the first transfer rule for school sports in Michigan. It required a student going from one secondary school to another to present a certificate from administrators of the school left that the student was eligible under the athletic rules of the time. The issue of the time was that students who were performing poorly in the classroom of one school would attempt to escape ineligibility due to academic deficiencies by transferring to another school
Two years later, a rule was adopted to address undue influence (recruiting) that required all schools to sever all relationships with a school that attempts to influence any athlete to change schools.
A year later (1904), this proposal was debated: “A student who has played on a football team, or on a baseball team, or who has taken part in any track events, going from one school to another, shall be ineligible to enter any secondary athletic contest for one year, unless the parents of such student move from one school district to another ...”
It took 20 years for a rule change to actually be made in this direction: “No student who has been enrolled as a high school student in any high school shall be permitted to participate in any interscholastic contest as a member of any other high school until he has been enrolled in such school for one full semester, unless the parents of such student actually change their residence to the second school district. In the latter case, the student will be as eligible as he was in the school from which he withdrew.”
There, in the first code of rules promulgated by the Michigan High School Athletic Association in 1924, is the core of our 2017 rule ... ineligible for one semester, with the exception for an actual change of residence.
Today we debate that the period of ineligibility is too short and the residency exception is too lenient.
As for the period of ineligibility, across the U.S., one year is more common than one semester. As for the residency exception, it exists everywhere. In fact, in some places the “transfer” rule is referred to as the “residency” rule.