That’s definitely got to be part of the discussion. How do we create fairness? – Juab School District superintendent Rick Robins
SALT LAKE CITY — Watching the teams arrive at Southern Utah University’s football stadium in the fall of 2014, Rick Robins saw a metaphor for the unique challenges confronting high school sports in Utah.
That was the year Judge Memorial, a small Salt Lake private school, played Juab, a small rural school in Nephi, for the 3A state championship.
“That morning we rolled onto the SUU campus in regular school buses,” said Robins, the Juab District superintendent. “Their kids come in two charter buses, and they get off with all the sweats and gear and bags; they have 10-12 assistants, we have three or four. That’s where capital comes into play. In an urban environment, you have more capital to draw on and that creates opportunities.”
Judge won that game 63-14, incidentally, and Robins, who has been a principal at both urban and rural high schools, said it highlighted why the Utah High School Activities Association needs to create as level of a playing field as possible. There are advantages, he said, from training to equipment to facilities that urban schools have and most rural schools do not.
“That’s definitely got to be part of the discussion,” Robins said. “How do we create fairness?”
While some tension has always existed between small (1A- and 2A-sized) urban private schools and small rural schools, those issues have been complicated by two things — the increased mobility of students, especially urban students, and the addition of charter schools to the education landscape. Charter schools are public schools, but they operate much like private schools, including having no geographic boundary. They are also more accessible because there is no tuition.
In about 2005, the UHSAA began receiving applications from charter schools requesting membership in the organization, which oversees high school athletics. Today there are 16 charter schools (and 17 private schools) competing with more than 115 traditional public schools.
Because most charter schools have charters that include smaller class sizes, the enrollment at those schools is often just a few hundred students, placing them in competition regions with the state’s smallest, most rural schools. Most of the charter schools, however, are in urban areas and draw students that either have attended or could attend 4A and 5A schools.
Almost immediately after charter schools were admitted into the UHSAA, issues arose. One of the first was when American Leadership Academy (a 2A-sized school) was accused of recruiting athletes for a girls basketball program. Other issues included charters gaining membership and then failing to field teams, resulting in small schools (most of which travel hours to play games) with holes in their schedules.
As the UHSAA struggled to find solutions to accommodate the new and evolving charter trend, one issue that continued to simmer was forcing small rural schools to play against urban charter schools. Those occasional flare-ups reached a fever pitch last winter when Summit Academy won the 2A boys basketball title with several players who were new to the school that year.
But while rural school advocates feel at a disadvantage because of the larger pool of students available to urban schools and greater access to resources, charter schools said they have their own challenges. Because charter schools have no traditional boundary, they have to sell their school and its programs to potential students anew each year. They see the lifelong friendships rural athletes have as a huge advantage when it comes to developing team chemistry.
Summit Academy assistant director and assessment coordinator Tammy Harter said offering athletics and activities is critical to the success of most schools, even the smallest. She worries that the rules governing transfers and participation haven’t kept pace with the changes in education.
“I don’t think the rules have kept up at all,” she said. “Academics are only part of the high school experience. For me personally, I was a three-sport athlete, there is no way you could have talked me into going to a school where I couldn’t play sports.”
She said most of the kids that choose Summit Academy are looking for a different experience than what is offered at the state’s largest schools, and extracurricular activities are a critical piece of that. She told the Deseret News in August that she feels the way transfers have been handled recently is especially punitive to schools without traditional enrollment populations.
“It feels very discriminatory, frankly,” Harter said. Summit Academy officials worried their transfers were being treated differently because they were hit with some of the harshest penalties in UHSAA history when a former assistant coach attempted to persuade football players from Copper Hills to transfer to the Draper school that competes in the 2A division.
“I really do feel like small schools are putting immense pressure on the board … to come down hard on private and charter schools,” Harter said. “Under the new guidelines, small class size, even if it’s in an IEP, is no longer a hardship. Most of our kids come to Summit because they want smaller class sizes.”
Ben Hill grew up playing basketball in Gunnison, and he’s been the school’s head boys basketball coach for the past six years. He said the biggest difference is that because he grew up playing schools in communities like his, they always knew what to expect and how to prepare.
“When you have a charter school on the schedule, you have no idea what you’ll see until you show up or do some preseason scouting,” Hill said. “For instance, we play Maeser Prep the first game of the season. They could have a 7-footer. We won’t know (who is on the team) until we show up.”
For rural students, Hill said, the high school experience is different from most urban communities.
“It’s definitely different,” he said. “In fact, it’s the only thing we have here. My son is a freshman, and if there wasn’t basketball, there would be nothing to do.”
That doesn’t mean the high school sports experience is any less meaningful to urban students, and UHSAA officials understand that. Attorney Mark Van Wagoner, who has advised the association for more than four decades, said restrictions of some kind are critical to ensuring fair play.
“You can want to change schools for academic, social or bullying or any other reason,” he said. “But we don’t think it’s in the interest of the programs we offer in high schools to allow (transfers) based on athletic programs. … It has to do with the nature of the competition that the association sponsors.”
High school sports are not meant to be competition at the highest level, like AAU or club programs.
“We’re as concerned about the kid who loves chemistry but can play tackle as we are the kid who is going to the NFL to play tackle,” Van Wagoner said. “If you turn it into the super league where you can transfer wherever you want to go for sports, you change the nature of high school sports.”
That is not to say there isn’t a way to do a better job of acknowledging the crucial role athletics play in the high school experience. Van Wagoner said that there could be a way to consider athletics in the equation rather than ignoring it altogether.
“If somebody said, ‘It’s a little bit sports and mostly medical issues, that’s worth discussing with the board in terms of hardship,” he said. “That might be something we need to do. But I think the kind of sports that we sponsor, when you think of high school sports, is one in which rapid movement of players and formation of elite teams is not good for the experience. That’s our philosophy. Other people can disagree, but that’s why we have the rule.”
Harter hopes the decision of State School Board members to propose drastic changes, including one that would eliminate the UHSAA's ability to restrict eligibility for transfer students, will prompt meaningful discussion and change.
“I think solutions are out there,” Harter said, acknowledging that she believes there have to be rules about player transfers. “First, we have to admit that there is an issue before we can solve it. Admitting that there is a problem and then being willing to be open to discuss possible solutions, we have to do that for the kids.”
Email: adonaldson@deseretnews.com
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