Roger Grossman
News Now Warsaw
Even though it’s summer in Indiana, the IHSAA has a lot of work to do, and the end of June is the deadline to get it done.
That’s because they need the month of July to get the word to member schools from Evansville to Fremont on what the changes are and what schools need to do to implement them.
In my opinion, the top line of their checklist of projects should be reviewing and redoing the transfer rules they put in place last summer.
Those rules say that any athlete at any school gets one “free” transfer to another school between the time they start high school and the start of their senior year.
It also allows an athlete who transfers to another school 365 days to have a change of heart and go back to their original school without any penalty or investigation.
We talked about it at the time the IHSAA passed this legislation, and I predicted that this would be more prevalent in the bigger cities at first and then would eventually trickle down to athletes at smaller schools.
We’ve seen some athletes in our area move, but not nearly at the rate they have in Indy, Fort Wayne and other larger areas.
What was slipped into the IHSAA’s transfer rules was the amendment that an athlete who transfers to another school is eligible to participate in contests 30 days after they officially sign the transfer paperwork with their new school.
Let me repeat that: those athletes are eligible to compete 30 days after they transfer no matter when that transfer happens.
Here is where this jumps the tracks: a girls basketball player, for example, who is playing on a team not having a very good season can transfer at Christmas Break and be eligible to play for her new team in her new school’s sectional.
Before you blame the folks at the IHSAA headquarters on North Meridian for opening the door for this kind of mess to happen, you need to start farther down the street.
No, this directive came from the Indiana Statehouse, where lawmakers again stuck their noses into a place they have no business being in.
The message from state lawmakers in the 2025 session to the IHSAA was, and I am paraphrasing here, “you are going to put this language into the transfer rules or we will do it or you, and if we have do it you probably won’t like what we do and how we do it.”
There was no wiggle room there, and so the IHSAA passed something to appease the General Assembly’s “school choice” mindset.
I mentioned the 30-day transfer rule to IHSAA Assistant Commissioner Jane Schott while she was in town for the boys track and field regional, and expressed my hope that she and the rest of the board would be able to rethink the “30-day” part of that policy.
I expressed to her that I would like to see that adjusted to at least 90 days, which would prevent kids from changing schools in the middle of the season and still being able to play for their new school come tournament at playoff time.
She and I have known each other for a while, so the conversation was taken as it was intended—as someone with skin in the game expressing real concern for the health of “education-based athletics in Indiana”.
She appreciated my concern and assured me that they were on the case.
I have since been told by a source I choose not to reveal that the IHSAA is working toward a solution to this issue.
The source told me that the board is thinking about applying the individual sports rule on transfers to the team sports. That rule is called the “75/25” rule, and it says that in order for an athlete to compete for their new school in the end-of-season tournament, they have to be enrolled and eligible at the new school for 75-percent of their school’s contests in that sport.
It takes into account an injury that might prevent someone from competing in the regular season and other similar scenarios.
That works for me.
I hope the IHSAA passes this and, maybe more importantly, I hope state lawmakers stay in their lane and let high school sports be run by the organization best suited to run it.
This is not preventing anyone from transferring to whatever school they want to play for. It does keep people from cheating the system and ruining the competitive integrity of high school sports by saying, “I want to play for this school this month, but I want to play for this other school in the tournament,” and win a state championship with a school they have attended for 32 days.
Remember, this is “education-based athletics”, not high school free agency.
