Schools, not NJSIAA, should monitor transfers

By popular demand, the Department of Dirty Pool, Sneaky Tricks, and Outright Cheating is back in operation at the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association.

It's called the Public/Non-Public Committee.

NJSIAA executive director Steve Timko said recent "media reports" about high-profile transfers and a groundswell of grumbling that certain schools are willing to bend or break the rules for athletic advantage have persuaded the organization to get back into the discipline business.

"These things are cyclical," Timko said Wednesday after the NJSIAA's first monthly meeting of the school year at the organization's headquarters in Robbinsville. "They come up, you deal with them."

Timko said the committee, which will be chaired by West Windsor-Plainsboro North principal Mike Zapicchi, would reconvene in the near future, with an eye toward creating a report with recommendations by February.

"Transfers, recruitment, bona fide change of address," Timko said in short summation of issues he would like the committee to address.

Timko also mentioned clarification of summer rules, out-of-season guidelines, and the shadow in the corner of the room that's growing larger every year: school choice.

Timko said "residency" was a major issue with him.

"You've got kids who say they are living with cousin Jane or Grandma Susie when they are really still living with their parents," Timko said of the practice of creating a fraudulent address for a student to allow him or her to participate in sports in another district.

I salute the NJSIAA for trying to deal with some of the unsavory aspects of scholastic sports.

I just don't think the organization should be doing others' work for them.

To me, the answer to this stuff is simple: Schools need to police themselves.

The people with real power and ultimate responsibility - superintendents and principals, most of all - need to make sure everybody in athletics in their school is playing by the rules.

How hard is that?

(Don't laugh.)

The NJSIAA is adept at establishing and administering guidelines for fair play, group alignment, and state tournament competition and also for setting statewide standards for safety concerns.

The organization has done some great work in the area of steroid testing, hydration testing in wrestling, sportsmanship issues, and concussion awareness and treatment.

But the NJSIAA doesn't have the manpower or the legal war chest to engage in comprehensive enforcement of the corner-cutting (or bald-faced rule-breaking) that often seems to undercut the notion of a level playing field for these teenage athletes.

Besides, any organization that oversees both public and non-public athletic programs is bound to get tangled up in a thicket of complications over "recruitment," especially since nearly every private school in the state readily acknowledges that the key to its survival is to "attract" students and their parents' tuition dollars.

The Public/Non-Public committee can come up with some new rules with regard to transfers and recruitment and residency - and can begin a long-overdue discussion about school choice and its growing impact on sports - but top-down enforcement will remain the major issue.

Besides, it makes zero sense for the NJSIAA to have to deal with questions of residency.

These are public schools. Those are public tax dollars paying for those educations.

If a student is not a resident and is attending a public school - and representing that school in athletics - that's on the district.

Where's the superintendent?

Where's the principal?

Where are the administrators in other schools in the same district?

This isn't big-time college football, where money drives everything and some coaches are more powerful than school presidents.

Superintendents and principals know everything that is happening in their district - or they should, anyway.

If something suspicious with regard to eligibility is happening in a public-school district, it's on the coach, athletic director, principal, and superintendent to investigate the matter and set things straight.

They talked a good game about "fair play" and doing the "right thing" and setting an "example" for those youngsters when they applied for those jobs, didn't they?