Tipping Point
April 11, 2014
During the 2010-11 school year we began working on new rules that might address the likelihood that (1) international students would begin to prefer the F-1 visa route to enrollment in our schools over the J-1 route, and (2) that our schools would with increasing efforts turn to foreign countries to recruit students to replace the declining population in Michigan and to replenish the funding that would allow those schools to operate at funding levels sufficient to maintain facilities, faculties and programs.
We got hung up and slowed down during these deliberations because of uncertainty about the future roles of the Council on Standards for International Educational Travel, the US Department of State and the US Department of Homeland Security, and hesitancy over the potential legal problems we might be creating by implementing practical solutions to real athletic-related problems that the influx of unvetted F-1 visa students had created and would continue to create with greater frequency as their numbers increased.
In 2012, there were more J-1 visa students enrolled through CSIET-approved programs in Michigan secondary schools than in any other state; and the total number of J-1 and F-1 students combined was also greatest in Michigan. And, having such a hospitable environment for J-1 students, we have predicted that a slowly growing percentage of the rapidly growing number of F-1 students in the US (80,000 in 2013) would begin enrolling in Michigan secondary schools.
The 2013-14 school year has brought things to a head, with certain high profile situations creating enough attention that hesitations were overcome and the adoption of new rules for 2014-15 became a foregone conclusion. You can find those changes here in Appendix B of the March Representative Council Minutes.
Very briefly, here are the key components of the new rules:
- Only those international students (J-1 or F-1) who qualify for one of the residency exceptions to the Transfer Regulation or are placed through an MHSAA Approved International Student Program can have varsity eligibility.
- J-1 and F-1 visa students have identical opportunities. If they are enrolled through an MHSAA Approved International Student Program, they are immediately eligible for one academic year, followed by one year of ineligibility before they could be eligible again. This is the “Play One, Wait One” rule that has previously applied only to J-1 foreign exchange students.
- Local schools may, if they wish, provide other international students subvarsity eligibility regardless of grade level, without MHSAA Executive Committee approval.
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.