Prep sports: Free movement

By Ed Piper, Jr.

I had an enlightening conversation with the father of a high school sports star several weeks ago.

During a preseason basketball tournament in southern San Diego County, I was in position taking photos of a morning game when a gentleman with a video camera happened by.

We exchanged the usual repartee about our respective cameras: "Oh, what kind of camera do you have?" and so forth, in mutual kindness and respect, as often occurs on the sidelines in the congenial atmosphere that prep sports afford.

The conversation continued, as we talked about teams we knew about and the latest on them.

This gentleman was blessed to be the father of a talented and tall student athlete who had already played one season of varsity athletics, and had one or more seasons yet to look forward to beginning this winter.

I mentioned that the local newspaper had carried a quote from the CIF San Diego Section commissioner recently, stating that come January the organization governing local high school athletics was going to discuss the transfer of students between schools with no limits whatsoever: no sit-out period due to transfer for "athletic reasons", and so forth.

This team video man stated his hearty support for such a move: "Well, you know, it's not a plantation or anything. They don't own you. You should be able to move to play wherever you want."

Frankly, in one fell swoop, my naïve, simplistic conception of high school sports as a bastion where academics come first and athletics are merely an offshoot of educational institutions preparing young people for college and career kind of took a hit beyond anything it had experienced before.

Here, the father of a capable junior who had transferred over the summer to a different high school was voicing what appears to be the inevitable future--a landscape in which students have no restrictions at all in what team they play for, a brave new world in which sports fully drive academics.

One student can play for teams at four different high schools in four years of school. As a retired public school teacher who enjoys sports but asserts the importance of a solid scholastic career of study over everything else in high school, I find this objectionable.

I know the clock is not going to be turned back, no matter how distasteful this aspect of the prep sports world becomes.

I just don't think John Dewey, the champion of universal public school education for everyone, had this in mind. Nor James Naismith, the good Canadian pastor who invented basketball using peach baskets in at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, two turns of the century back.

It's kind of a cynical world, that makes our young people like pieces of meat to be bought and sold, and shipped frozen to a new district or league.

The system that has evolved has made teens like pros, now to be free agents while they're still amateurs in name. You've seen even middle school athletes treated differently on campus, and not held to the same behavior standards as their classmates.

But there was still an innocence, an easy likeability to the whole thing that made you believe amateurism was still functioning in many ways.

Little things continue to creep in and pollute the system, like a prep sports academy division in the annual basketball tournament centered at Torrey Pines High every holiday vacation. 19- and 20-year-olds who are still technically eligible for high school sports, with unbelievable vertical leaps and abilities to soar above the basket, everybody suited out in the athletic shoes and gear of the particular shoe company sponsoring them.

Or this: the legal guardian of a humongous baller who is also the boy's AAU coach, moving the youth from the Midwest first to Morse, then to Cathedral Catholic, all in the name of freedom to gain an education where he so deems.

"I've seen this young man's handlers calling from the stands during the game, and the player doesn't know whether to listen to his coach or the people in the stands," says my conversation partner back in the dimly-lit gym, as the game goes on.

I'm for, and will always support from this forum and elsewhere, what is good, right, healthy, and safe for our young people. I'm for a student growing up to attend the schools in his geographical locale, and playing for the teams of the local high school throughout his or her four years of high school. A free public school, or a private school education of that student athlete's family's choice is the best preparation for future life as a young person, mature adult, and contributing citizen participating in our republican democracy.