Athletic Eligibility: Right or Privilege?

Minimum standards for participation, illegal recruiting and parental pressure combine for administrative migraines

The long list of infractions Berkeley High School's athletics program reported to the California Interscholastic Federation last year was a stunning testament to just how far students will go to participate in competitive sports.

With 32 varsity sports, 1,200 athletes, 96 coaches and 750 competitions each year, Berkeley High School is, by many accounts, the largest high school sports program in the nation, one with a rich history of state and national titles. Joe Martin, an ex-National Football League player who was brought on as Berkeley's athletic director in June 1997, singled out student eligibility as one of two major issues he intended to tackle during his first year on the job. (The other was corporate sponsorship.)

Student eligibility issues perennially bring some of the most severe headaches to coaches and high school principals, sometimes escalating to the level of superintendents and school boards. Most individuals involved in high school sports can identify students who, for one reason or another, should not be participating in athletics. Some may have failing grades; others may claim a false address or complete an illegal transfer to the school. And then there's the unscrupulous coach who will illegally recruit players from other attendance areas or perhaps overseas through foreign-exchange programs (see related story, page 10).

But even Martin, who coached varsity football at Berkeley after a short stint in professional football, was startled by the range and magnitude of student eligibility violations he discovered at the high school at the end of a six-month investigation. In all, Martin reported 45 infractions last January to the CIF, which governs competitive sports statewide. Among the violations was a 20-year-old junior college student enrolled at Berkeley High to play on the varsity football team; three athletes on the water polo team who actually were enrolled in a private school in nearby Oakland; and a teen-age tennis player from Germany with a 100 mile-per-hour serve who spoke no English, never enrolled in the school and spent his summer on the professional tennis circuit.

Martin's own stepson, who played on Berkeley's varsity football team the prior year, was even caught in the net. His family had been given the wrong school transfer form by the previous athletic director--an infraction that initially caused Berkeley to forfeit nine football games at the end of the 1996 season. Martin considered the error an honest mistake.

"What I've learned is that you have to be absolutely conversant in the rules and the bylaws. Otherwise, you jeopardize someone's potential athletic livelihood," says Martin, who brought seven former NFL players with him to coach football at Berkeley High. "You put a lot at risk when you have a premier athlete. Of the 400 athletes we graduate each year, 50 of them probably have full-ride scholarships. You take that 50 [and multiply it] times $200,000 per kid, and we're talking about mistakes that put millions of dollars at risk."

Challenging Authority

The stakes on student eligibility issues are high, but it's not because high school sports programs can claim the depth and on-field success of Berkeley. Only a small percentage of high school athletes qualify for National Collegiate Athletic Association competition at the Division I level, much less a professional sports career.

Many schools districts are faced now, more than ever, with challenges--both legal and legislative--to defend the validity of their student eligibility practices, according to state and national officials. Students and parents are pushing what they see as the absolute right of the student to compete on their school teams.

"You're seeing more challenges across the board to eligibility rules and I think that's typical of a couple of things," says Bob Kanaby, executive director of the National Federation of State High School Associations. "First, I think it represents that we do have more standards in place, and second, I think it shows we have a society that generally has taken a position that standards are to be challenged."

School administrators are finding themselves spending precious time in court and in the statehouse, defending long-established academic eligibility rules for student athletes, as well as ancillary requirements intended to discourage illegal redshirting and recruiting practices. Home schooling, open-enrollment charter schools and foreign-exchange programs provide new fodder for challenges or changes to current state policies on sports participation.

In addition, the NCAA has added a new hurdle by defining the core-course requirements for high school athletes who intend to compete at the Division I level in college during their freshman year. The burden falls on high school principals to certify and document their courses satisfy the NCAA's regimen, but the NCAA retains the right to overrule the school's judgment. (See related story, page 14.)

The new requirement for documentation makes it harder for a school or a student to insist, after the fact, that a high school course should carry the "core curriculum" label. While NCAA spokesman Wallace Renfro says only a small percentage have difficulty meeting the eligibility requirements, he admits the NCAA is troubled by the disproportionate number of disadvantaged and minority students who fail to meet the higher curriculum standards.

Legal Battles

Athletic eligibility codes are easy to support in theory, but harder to enforce. The moment a standout athlete is cut from the varsity roster for low grades, a rumble from parents or community boosters usually erupts over the fairness of a school district's eligibility rules.

Challenges in court have been wide ranging. In New Hampshire, a high school basketball player filed a lawsuit to add a one-semester extension to his athletic eligibility. In Arkansas, a senior questioned a mid-season suspension in state court, where a judge found the suspension had long-term consequences for the athlete beyond high school. Texas has reported numerous cases in which residency requirements have been brought into question. In Tennessee, an entire high school successfully argued against a one-year suspension from athletic competition for misconduct at a basketball tournament, arguing interscholastic participation is an integral part of the educational process.

Due process in student eligibility cases is and should be a legitimate concern among fair-minded school officials, says New Jersey attorney David Rubin. Rubin, who is past chairman of the National School Boards Association's Council of School Attorneys, says it is important to recognize when and under what circumstances a student is entitled to notice and a hearing.

"Each of the states--and the federal court system--have been given a fair amount of leeway, even to disagree with each other until the Supreme Court makes a ruling," Rubin says. "It's not unusual, in areas of civil rights, to see courts that see the very same constitutional amendments entirely differently."

So courts may come to the same conclusion but for different reasons, Rubin says. In some court cases, the student's long-term viability as an athlete is considered, In other cases, the student athlete is not entitled to a hearing under any circumstances.

"The question is whether the ability of the so-called student athlete is so extraordinary that taking away eligibility is treated the same way as taking away somebody's bank account," says Rubin, equating athletic ability with any other property the athlete might own.

Texas's University Interscholastic League, the statewide governing body for school sports, faced nine separate court cases last year over students who were found by school district committees to have transferred to a new school strictly for athletic purposes. District committees are the gatekeeper for eligibility, but proving the student's motives in such transfer cases often is time-consuming and difficult, says Rex Spain, assistant director of athletics at the University Interscholastic League.

"Certainly there are legitimate transfers. Even a distinct personality conflict between the player and the coach can be considered a legitimate reason for a transfer under some circumstances if it can be documented," says Spain, explaining the waiver process. "The problem is for every legitimate case we have more than one illegitimate case, where it's a matter of a parent deciding their child needs more playing time at the quarterback position."

Competitive Environments

Some would consider legal challenges a sign of the times. Wisconsin's Fond du Lac school district was taken to court last year over the district's decision to equate a year of home schooling with a year of athletic eligibility for two high school athletes. A $1.5 million federal lawsuit alleged the district had denied the two student athletes their civil rights. Ironically, the man who filed it--father to one of the athletes and uncle to the other--also happened to be the long-time high school basketball coach in Fond du Lac.

School board president Margaret Swick--who was unable to discuss the specifics of the court case while in litigation--says the pressure on school boards from overachieving baby boomer parents is immense. Parents are constantly looking to push the boundaries of school district policy, whether it's athletic eligibility or academic class rank.

"My son just returned from a very competitive soccer camp at Duke University--three soccer camps, a week apiece, with 400 kids each," says Swick of her own experience as a soccer mom. "You can t tell me those parents didn't take those kids there to see how they measured up against each other. They wanted to see how good they are, whether they had a chance at a college scholarship. It's a very competitive atmosphere."

If a loophole can be found in school district policy, a parent is going to find it, she says. It's the school board's job, however, to protect the interests of all students who participate in sports, Swick calls it the creation of "equitable participation."

"We heard from a lot of parents who were concerned about their children being bumped off the team," Swick says. "We're not talking about scholarship kids. We're talking about the kids who just want to play, who just want a chance to run high school track. We're talking about kids who just want the chance to be a part of a high school team."

Legislative Interference

State lawmakers have rarely resisted the urge to tinker with student eligibility policy--dating back to the much-ballyhooed "no pass, no play" reforms engineered through the Texas legislature by billionaire businessman H. Ross Perot in the early l980s. In some states, lawmaking bodies have passed legislation to determine how high the bar should be set for student eligibility, under what circumstances and under whose jurisdiction. (See related story, page 37.)

Those types of unilateral decisions often can be confusing to district and state officials with established standards. In Georgia, the state legislature mandated the state board of education to administer eligibility standards and hear waivers. The only problem was this clearly duplicated services already provided by the state's activities association. A similar scenario has existed in Arkansas for several years.

Last fall, the Georgia state board bowed out of the eligibility business, leaving the work to the activities association on the condition the association maintain the current standards.

"The state board was very sensitive to the fact that their departure might be perceived as lowering standards," says Bill Barr, director of the Georgia School Superintendents Association. "They were very careful to point out the minimum requirements for eligibility for the state department of education were being met by the state association."

Barr says he never has been opposed to academic standards for athletes, but he would have preferred to see some research before so many decisions were made about eligibility.

"We never did any research to look at the performance of students in interscholastic activities," Barr points out. "It would be good to see if you need requirements before you enact them. I don't want to give the impression that as an association we were opposed to standards, but we would have liked to see standards that were grounded in fact."

Then there are those times the intervention of the state body is considered meddling. Last year, the Florida legislature mandated new student eligibility requirements: a cumulative grade point average of 2.0 on a 4.0 scale, with grades checked once a semester. That replaces the established standard of a 1.6 grade point average, with students required to pass five classes each grading period. Those grades were checked every six weeks.

The downside is students now can qualify for athletics by taking a heavy load of easy non-core courses, such as physical education, teacher assistance or work-study programs, says Paul McLaughlin, director of athletic operations for the Florida High School Activities Association. And it doesn't necessarily mean the student can graduate. Those who are disqualified from play are also often out for an entire season--a big handicap for football.

"People say football is a way out for a lot of lower socioeconomic kids," McLaughlin says. "To me, the bigger hurt is to have a great high school athletic career and not be able to go on to college. We always have a certain number of kids who don't go on."

The issue of student eligibility is a complex one, McLaughlin says. He declines to discuss whether the new standards set by state lawmakers are appropriate, except to throw out one comment. "I'm not going to go up the street to the Chevy dealer and tell him how to sell Chevys ..." he trails off. His reference to state lawmakers is obvious.

Educators and coaches--not lawmakers--are the ones who work closest with student athletes, Kanaby says. They have the best idea of how to set appropriate standards for student athletes. Right or wrong, eligibility requirements are setting a higher set of expectations for athletic participation than for earning a high school diploma, Kanaby says.

"Each and every state association has within its prescribed base of operations the means by which those (eligibility) rules can be examined internally on a regular basis," Kanaby says. "The point should not be overlooked that these rules are established by educators across this country and any subsequent review of them should involve that educational group."

Setting Priorities

When school leaders fail to keep tabs on their athletic programs, the school system's public image can be the recipient of a serious black eye. That's what educators at Bonny Eagle High School in Standish, Maine, faced during the past year. When an accreditation review team from the Maine Department of Education put the high school on probation, the district had to find a way to send a message to the community that academics are important at this school.

The solution was a student eligibility policy, passed by the school board in February, which requires students now maintain a 1.5 grade point average and pass three out of four subjects to participate in extracurricular activities. Because the high school uses a four-period block schedule, the new requirements give students little latitude for failure.

"If you carry that grade point Out, it's only a D+," says assistant principal Gary Stevens. "That's not a very high standard, but we had to do something. We are a quality school, and I think our school board saw this accreditation rating as something we had to address."

In a state where few high schools have grade point requirements, Bonny Eagle's new policy represented a strong stand. Of the 30 high schools in the conference surveyed by Stevens, only four carried grade point requirements for athletes on the books. The Bonny Eagle policy was immediately one of the strictest, if not the strictest, in Maine, Stevens says.

As a concession to those who worried the policy would discourage student participation, the proposal was amended to include a probationary period for borderline students--those below a C average--by mandating a weekly tutoring session for those involved in after-school activities. Stevens anticipates the school will have no problem filling the 41 teams in 23 sports, even though the school has only 1,400 students. Bonny Eagle is considered large by standards in Maine, where the average high school enrolls 500.

High-Achieving Players

Some consider the implementation in 1984 of the no pass, no play policy in Texas to be the watershed case on athletic eligibility at the secondary school level. Athletic eligibility policies were not new to Texas nor to the nation, but the line drawn by no pass, no play was probably one of the strictest standards ever set for high school athletes. For the first time, students in Texas were required to attend classes regularly and pass all courses to be eligible.

Just like Bonny Eagle's new policy, no pass, no play in Texas was intended to send a clear message: Students come to high school to learn. Academics must come first. Extracurricular activities are a privilege, not a right. Fail to pass and you pass to the bench.

Implicit in student eligibility policies is the assumption that students participating in extracurricular activities-- whether football, marching band or cheerleading--need to be held to academic standards and possibly even higher standards than their classroom peers.

Roger Whitley, who recently completed a three-year study analyzing the records of 243,000 North Carolina students in 133 schools, disagrees. Compared side-by-side with non-athletes from the same schools, student athletes had higher grades, better attendance, fewer behavior problems and lower dropout rates, he says.

"By putting eligibility standards in place, you're assuming the student athlete is not performing and that's an invalid assumption," Whitley says, dismissing the "dumb jock" stereotype. "If you really wanted to do something to improve student grades, you need to get students more involved in the school, in extracurricular activities, not less."

Walt Buster, superintendent of the Clovis, Calif., Unified School District, argues student eligibility flies in the face of education for the "whole child." Athletics and academics in the same school day should not be an "either-or" proposition, Buster says.

"I sometimes wonder what the logic is behind a student failing English and not being able to play basketball," Buster says. "If a student missed a free throw, would we decide he couldn't play English next week?"

One California program, Promoting Achievement in School through Sport, takes the hypothesis one step further. Physical activity is incorporated into actual classroom instruction as a way to teach instructional concepts. Academics have a distinct prejudice against physical activity, blocking students from an effective venue to teach everyday lessons, says Joel Kirsch, executive director of the American Sports Institute in San Francisco.

"To shut kids off from sports is absurd," Kirsch says. "Rather than taking what kids know and love to create a catalyst for what they can learn, we take away the one thing they enjoy and the one thing they can dedicate themselves to doing. ... The real issue is not no pass, no play. It's using whatever we can to get our children to pass."

Ongoing Monitoring

Objections to student eligibility policies are widespread. Some fear these policies will penalize too many students and increase the likelihood those students will drop out of school. Others contend the policies encourage students to take easier courses in order to remain eligible for athletic teams. Still others fear eligibility policies decrease team depth and quality and could deny students the possibility of athletic scholarships.

Ten years of study by the Howard County, Md., Public Schools--which field the state's best teams in some sports--show none of those claims are true, says Sandra French, who chairs the school board. Fewer than 2 percent of students in the Howard County district are ever penalized by the academic eligibility policy. No team has had trouble with depth, the percentage of regional and state titles is unchanged and the local percentage of scholarship winners, at 2 percent, is consistent with national averages.

"Students rise to meet your expectations if you provide them the academic assistance they need and you make it clear there is no favoritism. All must be treated equally," says French, who presented her findings at last year's National School Boards Association convention. "We've had a very strong academic emphasis with our athletes--providing them with mentors and support services--to keep them eligible."

The key to academic eligibility policies is to check eligibility only once per season, French says. Taking an athlete off the field in mid-season, at the end of a marking period, penalizes both the athlete and the team. Keeping an athlete on the team encourages students, under the watchful eye of their coaches, to keep the grades up.

Even those who took some hard knocks with early academic eligibility policies agree the policies can work. L.S. Register was coaching in Little Rock, Ark., eight years ago when the school district implemented a 2.0 rule. The first year, only 44 players made it to the field for football season. Still, the team qualified for the state playoffs, even though Little Rock was the only district in the state to set academic eligibility standards.

"You've got to take the hand that's dealt to you and work with it," says Register, who now coaches at nearby El Dorado High School. "It probably took us three or four years to get some stability in our program. It was devastating at the time, but we worked with it."

The superintendent of a small, rural Oregon district tackled student eligibility his first year on the job. Plenty of fingerpointing went on in the board room, the superintendent says, when board members realized even their children would be cut from teams. Coaches were furious, one even threatening a lawsuit. With no way to field a team, games were forfeited, which was a devastating blow for the tiny school district, the superintendent admits.

"Athletic eligibility issues are a political nightmare in very small towns and school districts," says the superintendent, who asked not to be named. "I opened the can of worms here during my first year as superintendent. It was a mistake--my biggest. I should have waited at least a year."

Self -Policing Typical

In Berkeley, Calif., Joe Martin, the district's athletic director, credits the support of Superintendent Jack McLaughlin in helping the district to "come clean" about the high school's multiple infractions of state regulations. Because Berkeley High School chose to investigate, report to state authorities and resolve its own eligibility problems--not unlike the scenario in most scholastic sports violations nationwide--the penalties against the California high school were relatively light.

"We'd been in a situation for several years where there really had been no consistent management of student eligibility for the high school or district," says McLaughlin, who coached girls' soccer earlier in his career. "We're still developing policies that will help us avoid this situation in the future."

As part of its agreement with the California Interscholastic Federation, the school district agreed to provide extensive training on eligibility issues to the school's 96 coaches. In addition, athletic officials now use a computerized database tied to the district's administrative records to keep a closer eye on athletes, allowing Martin to monitor their grades and review the files of those who are currently ineligible because of poor academic performance. He and the superintendent know that raising the bar again for student athletes--to a proposed 2.5 grade point average from 2.0--will disqualify another 12 percent of the athletes from the Berkeley High School program.

Cases such as Berkeley's where the high school or school district self-police and self-report remain common, but enforcing student eligibility has not become any easier over time. Texas' University Interscholastic League reports that of the 250 or so phone calls received at its Austin headquarters each day, 80 percent deal with eligibility issues, associate director Cynthia Doyle says. Whereas several infractions a week would be serious enough to warrant state intervention in the early 1990s, this year probably no more than 15 of the state's 1,202 high schools will commit serious enough violations of the athletic eligibility rules to merit disciplinary action.

Flexibility Advised

Many who deal with student eligibility agree the key to good policy is flexibility, whether it's intended to improve current practice or address various reforms. Legislative reforms to no pass, no play in Texas have cut the suspension period of athletes from six weeks to three weeks. Equally important, the students were allowed to return to the field for practice during their suspension, even though they weren't allowed to play in games.

"If you flunk math class, your math teacher didn't refuse to work with you anymore," says Spain, the assistant director of athletics at the University Interscholastic League in Texas. "It's our strong belief that the (relationship with) coaches and the participation in sports are paramount in that young athlete's life. When you separate the athlete from his team and send him away from practice, it's like cutting the umbilical cord. We found our programs were losing kids because they were just slipping away from us."

Eligibility policies also must make accommodations for education reform. Delaware passed open-enrollment legislation two years ago, allowing students to enroll in any school with available seats. State officials are keeping an eye on the possibility of illegal recruitment of standout athletes, although no major violations have surfaced yet.

"I don't want to say we have a major number of coaches who are attempting to recruit players, but I am beginning to hear more about it," says Robert Depew, executive director of the Delaware Secondary School Athletic Association. "There is a concern on my part that we're going to have to deal with it more than we have in the past."

Kimberly Reeves is a free-lance education writer based in Houston, Texas. E-mail: [e-mail]

The Attraction of Foreign-Exchange Athletes

Kimberly Reeves

David Fry's introduction to the complex issues surrounding foreign-exchange students in athletics came in the form of a 7-foot-tall basketball player from Germany who took his high school basketball team to second place in the state high school tournament in Illinois.

One stellar basketball season with a star foreign-exchange student might have been accepted, Fry says, because athletics is intended to be an integral part of the foreign-exchange experience. But then the German player decided to come back to the United States to play a second basketball season. High school coaches said enough was enough.

"We had a lot of coaches who got frustrated," says Fry, who is executive director of the Illinois High School Association, which oversees varsity sports competition. "They were saying, 'They've got a kid who doesn't live here. He

comes here from another country. He's using the exchange program for something it wasn't intended to be."'

And so the line was drawn in Illinois for setting a new limitation for foreign-exchange students: one year of athletic eligibility. That was 14 years ago, and most states have since put in place the same restriction. Yet many states, Illinois included, continue to grapple with the issue of foreign-exchange students competing on their American high schools' varsity teams--and in so doing displacing homegrown students from starting positions and playing time.

School leaders still must be careful that their coaches do not use the ex- change programs to recruit athletes in sports such as soccer, tennis and basketball, in which talented foreign youngsters can make a decided impact. Coaches in Wisconsin periodically complain about the effects of standout ice hockey players from abroad, and officials in Ohio report concerns being raised about overseas tennis players dominating the local competition.

Powerful Lures

It's no wonder foreign athletes are tempted. A successful season of high school play in the United States could guarantee a full athletic scholarship at a major university, leading to a lucrative professional sports career. The 7-foot German graduated from his American high school, earned a four-year ride at Indiana University and spent several well-paid seasons in the National Basketball Association.

The temptation was enough for Fry and other educators to step in to create the Council on Standards for International Educational Travel in 1984. The Virginia-based organization evaluates and monitors foreign exchange programs. Approved programs--which must agree to hold themselves accountable to national standards--are placed on a CSIET list that's distributed to schools across the country, Executive Director Maureen Gavaghan says. The programs are reviewed and monitored annually.

During the past year, 71 organizations applied for CSIET's endorsement, and seven were rejected. The approved foreign-exchange programs placed an estimated 28,000 foreign students in U.S. high schools. In Illinois and Wisconsin, 450 foreign-exchange students were certified for athletic competition last year. The Michigan High School Athletic Association, in a statewide survey, found 483 of the 859 foreign-exchange students enrolled in 1996-97 had participated in interscholastic athletics.

Gavaghan and others tend to discount claims of widespread abuse, saying only a fraction of the foreign-exchange placements nationwide involve recruitment of an athlete. But the possibilities are real enough that state athletic officials in Missouri, Texas and Michigan devoted columns in their monthly newsletters to the subject during the past year. And news accounts of unfair practices surface from time to time.

The Los Angeles Times documented the widespread appearance of foreign basketball players, many of them from Australia, turning up in southern California. The Herald-Journal in Syracuse, N.Y., has reported several times on the use of multiple foreigners on the boys soccer team at Chittenango High School, where the coach doubles as the district's foreign-exchange coordinator. The team often ranked as one of the state's best, and Chittenango's opponents would taunt the team as the "Foreign Express." Several years ago, administrators halted the practice by placing a limit of two foreign students a year in the district.

A Useful Resource

While accusations of illegal recruitment may be investigated by state-level sports associations, a foreign-exchange program can be stripped of its CSIET accreditation if it is proven athletes were intentionally fielded or placed by the exchange program, Gavaghan says.

"Our goal is to create a fair playing field and an equitable method of accepting exchange students to participate in sports in school," she says. "In most places, playing sports is seen as a privilege, and students have to meet a number of regulations within their own home state in order to participate. Exceptions are made for exchange students because high school associations do believe sports are a valuable experience for exchange students."

But high schools need to know the foreign-exchange student comes from a creditable exchange program, Gavaghan says.

Copies of the approved list of overseas exchanges are available for $15 from CSIET, 212 S. Henry St., Alexandria, Va. 22314. CSIET also can be contacted via e-mail ([e-mail]),