Fifty miles makes a big difference. It can separate you from longtime friends, locations where your favorite childhood memories were held, that tree where you got your first kiss under- you get it.
But in the case involving the Arizona Interscholastic Association (AIA), it is the exact distance that can separate you from playing your beloved school sport for an entire school year.
The AIA has been known for concocting controversial guidelines over the years, but nothing surpasses this idiotic rule. This rule will keep an athlete from playing their respective sport for one school year if they transfer to another school within a 50 mile radius.
Have the AIA board members not taken into account the family emergencies that can cause a student to move 50 miles away from their previous school, or has that just blown over their heads when they are conducting such conferences?
Whatever the case may be, the AIA has once again failed in producing a reliable system.
You could say there are a few (very few) benefits in implementing this rule. It would help crack down on athletes who are transferring to a school for the sheer purpose of having a better chance at winning a state title.
It would also help eliminate the chances of a new transfer student earning a starting position nod over an athlete that has been in the school’s system for a longer period of time. However, there are more efficient ways of eliminating such cases.
To prohibit the first case, the school can look into the reason why a student has transferred to their school and come to a conclusion of whether they should be able to play or not.
If there were some uncontrollable cause that forced the student to transfer, let them play.
As for the second case, if the school is worried about an athlete getting mistreated due to competition, then they need to get over the fact that there are better players that can contribute to their team. Make the transfer student be second-string if needed, but completely prohibiting the athlete from playing is not the correct solution.
In some ways, this new rule would prove to be beneficiary. However, in more ways, this rule would prove to be too unfair for every athlete’s sake. Should the AIA revise this rule? Not in the least bit. The AIA should completely erase this proposal and move on.
