Transfer portal now.

Can sports participation help develop positive character traits in young people? 

Do coaches and team cultures play a role in that character development?

Do all high school coaches provide the same quality of mentorship and guidance to kids?

If the answers to these questions seem obvious, then what’s less obvious is how we can defend the way California governs the student-athlete transfer process at the high school level.

Because the current thinking around high school student-athlete transfers is incongruous with the support of whole-person development.

As background, here’s a simplified summary of the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) transfer rule:

Students are eligible to play sports at a new school if they move residences or experience a documented hardship; students are eligible for half their season if they don’t move, but it’s their first transfer; students are ineligible if they follow a club coach or have pre-enrollment contact with a coach at their new high school. If the transfer was athletically motivated, the student is ineligible regardless of the situation. 

Italics added for emphasis on the most blatantly obsolete positions. 

If sports participation can help develop young people into productive citizens — and that belief is baked into the CIF’s mission statement — then we can also assume that parents are justified in seeking out the best mentors and leaders for their children. They do it already in every other arena, and we applaud them for it: they can transfer without penalty to a school with a strong band program if their student is a musician; they can transfer without penalty to pursue foreign-language programs offered by certain schools or districts; they can transfer without penalty to a school with an emphasis on engineering, or skilled trades, or special education, or… 

Rational readers get the point.

But when it comes to high school sports, much rationality is lost. 

There’s a subtle judgment here, written into the CIF’s transfer rules, lying just beneath their surface: if you’re the type of family using sports as a vehicle for your child’s development, instead of the violin or mathematics, we know what’s actually best for you.  

Except, no, they don’t. They don’t!

In an era in which coaches are being removed even when they win (with the assumption being that off-field issues led to their removal); operate in climates such that we lose the officials we have and can’t attract replacements; or are simply too overwhelmed or underpaid to spend the time required to build a vibrant program; parents who seek out high-performing coaches are doing what’s best for their children. 

And we want to penalize them for that by forcing their children to sit out a full year of playing? Or reward only those who can afford a full family move of residences? Or incentivize lying about following a coach who’s already proven to be a positive influence on their child? 

I’m a high school athletic director, and even I cannot fully defend every athletic program we offer on campus. I am not unique in this among my peers. There are too many politics at play, and too few coaching applicants from which to choose, to remove certain coaches in hopes of finding more suitable mentors for our kids. We do our best to guide and shape some of our less-developed programs, but I also know there are better programs around our county; I don’t begrudge parents for going out and finding them. 

I’m also not ready to be at odds with the U.S. Department of Justice.

“College athletes should be able to freely choose the institutions that best meet their academic, personal and professional development needs without anticompetitive restrictions that limit their mobility by sacrificing a year of athletic competition,” said Jonathan Kanter, Assistant Attorney General from the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. Kanter issued his statement when joining a lawsuit of 10 states against the NCAA. The NCAA promptly adjusted their transfer rules. 

Now that student-athletes can finally (justifiably!) profit off their own name, image and likeness – at both the high school and collegiate level – for how long can the CIF remain out of step with the NCAA? The DOJ lawsuit hit the NCAA first, but how long are high school administrators willing to wait before they’re named next?

Allow me a moment for a brief rebuttal of the next obvious point. For those who would say that abolishing these transfer rules will lead to a free-for-all wherein certain schools would reap the lion’s share of the benefits from being able to recruit and enroll the best athletes: let me introduce you to the Mater Dei and St. John Bosco football teams. 

So will some families choose to hop from school to school to try to find more playing time, or a coach whose offense suits their child’s strengths, or schools whose programs understand NIL leverage? Of course. Are we sure that’s bad? We are not, unless we know the exact situation of every single student. And quality coaches with established expectations around playing time and a mature understanding of the balance between competitiveness and character development won’t have any issues with it, either. 

The irony of my position here is that I actually don’t believe that an emphasis on winning at the high school level is healthy for kids. That’s not what any of this is about. This is about allowing students and parents the freedom to do what’s best for their own children. My opinion about the role of sports in kids’ lives doesn’t matter. I’ll never know what’s best for someone else’s kids, and I’m increasingly uncomfortable enforcing rules that restrict parents’ ability to adjust course based on their appropriately-evolving understanding of the needs of their teenagers. 

The solution is simple: put power back in the hands of parents and principals. If a student is enrolled academically, let sports participation be just as straightforward. 

Sports are too important to ask parents to just show up on campus and hope for the best. Sports have too much potential to provide a course-correction for challenged kids to ask parents to simply stick with a program that’s not serving their family’s needs. 

There are many good people involved in the governance of high school athletics, and I trust that the CIF believes in its own mission. Something needs to change.