Probably no issue in high school sports should engender as much discussion among us as much as the issue of students attending a school outside of their own attendance boundaries. You can make your case for PEDs as the most important topic of discussion, but open enrollment threatens to change the landscape of high school sports far more quickly, and possibly even more decisively, than PEDs.
We have had recent open enrollment discussions in cross country, and we have had them in track and field. Yet even so, we have probably had fewer of those discussions than any of football, wrestling, volleyball, baseball, and basketball have had.
Relative to other sports, the issue of students opting into a school other than the one indicated by their physical place of residence is smaller for us. Whether or not it helps to know that other people have bigger problems than we do remains to be seen.
The primary springboard for this issue, whether in track, in volleyball, or in any other sport, is Colorado's open enrollment law.
Colorado school law mandates open enrollment for public schools. As long as there is space in the building, a student from anywhere in Colorado may opt into a school anywhere else in Colorado without paying tuition (though, typically, they must provide their own transportation). There are several positives to this provision:
1. Parents are not stuck sending their children to underperforming schools.
2. If parents deem a school unsafe for their child(ren), they do not have to incur the expense of a private school or a physical change of residence to get into another school.
3. A child is not excluded from a program attractive to that child if it is not offered at the school indicated by his or her attendance boundaries.
4. The law encourages schools to compete for students. At least in theory, it gives schools an incentive to improve existing programs and develop attractive new programs.
And that list could go on indefinitely.
Needless to say, this is not the same world that most of the adults reading this article grew up in. When I was in high school, school choice options typically amounted to attending a private school or, in some cases, attending a school where one of your parents happened to teach. Otherwise, it was not usually possible to cross attendance boundaries.
To be sure, there were people who circumvented the rules back in the day. One method of doing so was to enroll with an address other than your address of actual residence. That did not work so well in smaller communities where everyone knew everyone else, but the strategy was doubtlessly used with some success in metropolitan areas.
Overwhelmingly, though, people attended school where they lived. No small amount of community pride attached to the successes of the various teams at the local high school. No small measure of personal pride attached to representing the community school on the field, the court, or the track.
We all grew into adulthood feeling that that was the way it was supposed to be. We know differently now. We know that is not the way it is any longer. Open enrollment is no longer a new thing. But, the old way of thinking refuses to die. We still believe in the back of our minds that the ideal scenario is everyone attending school where they live, at least where high school sports are concerned.
And, it was perceptions of an uneven playing field that undergirded much of the suspicion about the legitimacy of private school athletic teams back when I was in high school. Since private schools had no attendance boundaries, they could cherry pick athletes who were not available to other schools. Or at least that was the claim--private schools were not limited in the same fashion that public schools were.
Magnet schools and charter schools have more recently joined private schools in this perception.
But, with the passing of Colorado's open enrollment law, every school in the state has effectively become a school of choice. Many families, of course, continue to default to no choice--meaning they attend the school whose attendance boundary they domicile within. Or, families make their choice simply by purchasing their home within the boundaries of the school they want their children to attend. But, more and more each year, parents opt to send their child(ren) to schools beyond their own attendance boundaries.
The reasons for this decision are legion, but I will try naming a few:
1. A child's best friend goes to another school.
2. A family friend or family member teaches at another school.
3. The school of the family's attendance area is perceived as underperforming or unsafe.
4. A school across an attendance area or two has a program the designated school for the family's residence does not.
5. Parents wish to distance their child(ren) from the daily influence of certain friends.
6. The parents have had a prior disagreement with an administrator at the high school covering their attendance area.
7. A particular sports program of interest an attendance area or two away is a superior choice (for any of a variety of reasons) to the program at the school designated for the family.
It is usually well and good until we get to that seventh reason. That seventh reason militates against our sense of the way things are supposed to be--the way things were in previous generations.
Up in Aurora, CHSAA works very hard--and unenviably--to support our sense of the way things are supposed to be. Needless to say, Colorado's open enrollment law makes things an order of magnitude or two more difficult for CHSAA.
And it is not as if our sense of the way things should be is rooted solely in nostalgia. It does not take a lot of prescience to see that open enrollment swings a door wide open to the rich getting richer in the athletic world on a very large scale. Even one or two high-level athletes opting into another school can easily swing the competitive balance of things. We have all seen it happen, and it is not necessarily a whole lot of fun to have to go up against those teams.
But, aside from our preconceived notion of how things are supposed to be in high school sports, it's tough to make a compelling case for why school choice is a good thing in all areas except sport.
If it is legitimate to choose one teacher over another, or one school's program over another for the benefit of a child, why should the same logic not apply to a coach or athletic program? That is a difficult question to answer for those who want things to stay the way they "are supposed to be" in high school sports.
Even so, the consensus remains that we want things to stay the way they "are supposed to be." Therefore, CHSAA works to develop and enforce rules that help keep things that way.
The transfer rule is the most obvious manifestation of CHSAA's effort to keep things as like what they once were as possible. We restrict an athlete's eligibility if he or she moves from high school to high school without a bona fide family move. We restrict an athlete's eligibility if that athlete follows a club coach to a school where that person also coaches. We even propose to restrict the speech of all manner of individuals, including those not employed by any school, who might otherwise try to influence a young person to attend a particular school.
All of this, of course, amounts to monumental balancing act. We are restricting in the name of athletics the very freedoms we readily embrace in the name of academics.
At least in part, that would be because athletics is much closer to a zero sum game than academics. There is only one state title to be won in 3A cross country. One team winning that title necessarily excludes all other teams from doing the same. There is not only one admission to Harvard, to Stanford, or to the United States Military Academy to be gained. One student transferring to Salida High School might easily tilt the balance for the former in a way that it would never tilt any balance for the latter examples.
Because high school sports is, or at least is very close to, a zero sum game, people get a little sensitive about matters like tilting the balance. Honestly, when a handful of (or more) athletes and their parents all make the same decision to attend the same school--whether or not that decision is made within the boundaries of the CHSAA rules governing the matter--it does tend to diminish something important about high school sports.
At one time or another, this diminution has probably been seen in every high school sport in Colorado. It has most certainly been seen more frequently in several other sports than it has been seen in track and cross country.
In short, school choice with respect to athletics quickly becomes a modern-day example of the tragedy of the commons. School choice is a good thing on balance. It should be, and is, open to all walks of people.
Yet, when even a relatively modest number of individuals start making choices (even assuming everyone is operating within the CHSAA rules) that are rightfully theirs and sending their children to the programs perceived as being the most desirable, the power in high school sports swings rapidly and dramatically in the direction of a few attractive programs. The sense of community in high school sports is diminished. And, ultimately, all of that makes the whole enterprise a little less fun for the vast majority of the people involved.
As more programs resign themselves to coming out on the losing end of things, some of the thrill and accomplishment of winning is simultaneously eroded away.
It is worse, of course, once people start operating outside of the rules, but even choice within the rules has potential to take us quickly in a direction most of us do not want to be headed.
It is not my purpose to name individuals or schools here, but I will venture to say that the large majority of successful track and cross country programs in this state have benefitted from students opting into their program. I know several highly-respected coaches who would prefer not to speak in any public sort of way about the number of athletes who somehow end up at their school from outside the attendance boundaries of that school. And that is not to imply that any of those schools and coaches have done anything wrong, or anything against any of the mutually agreed upon rules.
It is undeniable, however, that an athletic program with demonstrated success is a substantial draw for like-minded individuals to enroll in that school.
It is widely rumored that several of the top programs across the state in other sports have rosters stocked with athletes attending from across attendance boundaries. More precisely, there is often little distinction between club rosters and scholastic rosters. Yet, if those athletes willingly sat out their required periods of sub-varsity eligibility, choiced in as freshmen, or made bona fide family moves, those teams are operating completely within the rules.
No amount of exasperation felt by any among us changes any of that.
If cross country is important to your daughter and you are moving from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, who is to suggest that you should not evaluate the cross country programs of all high schools in Colorado Springs that are open to receiving new students? And, what rule is there against that? What rule should there be against that?
If your son is a rising freshman and a promising hurdler, why would that fact not be among the considerations for which school you will send him to in the fall? And, if two schools weigh equally in your mind, on balance, in all other respects, why wouldn't you send him to the school where his good friend and mentor from club track is now an accomplished junior in the hurdles program?
At bottom, what we must realize is that we hold to two paradigms that tend to work in conflict with each other.
We believe in choice. We resist, fiercely, the regulation of our choices. Typically, we also tend to resist the regulation of speech that would influence choice. We also believe in a model of high school sport where one community does its very best to compete on a level playing field with other communities.
Yet it is our tenacious devotion to choice that threatens to tilt the level playing field totally out of kilter. Maintaining anything remotely resembling a level playing field seems to demand that we regulate choice and the speech that would try to influence choice. And that is a decision that goes down hard.
The only other option is to exercise collective self-restraint in making decisions about choicing into schools for athletic programs. But, it doesn't take many opting out of the collective self-restraint for that strategy to fail.
For these reasons, we may be living in the twilight of high school athletics as we have known them. As I read the currents of our culture, the forces for choice are stronger than the forces for high school sports the way they were when my generation was growing up. If I am correct about this, high school sports will continue to become a little more like club sports with each passing year. Eventually, perhaps, it becomes no longer worth maintaining any distinction between the two.
The battle has already been lost on several fronts.
College sports, once the bedrock of amateur (setting aside the popular negative connotation associated with that word, as in "amateurish") status and principles, has wandered far from its original intent-though perhaps not at as much so at the DIII level. College sports have become very big business, complete with all the considerations of very big business, and that is something most of us would prefer not to witness at the high school level.
The Olympics long since gave up the notion of being about anything other than professional sports and the professional approaches to sport that accompany that status.
High school sport is the lone remaining major citadel of the purest principles of amateur sport, and its walls are starting to crumble.
I suspect we will find we have lost something more special than we realize when the walls finally collapse altogether.
As an aside, one of the mixed emotions I have about running Colorado Track XC concerns the sneaking suspicion I have that this site tends to grease the skids toward a drift away from high school sports as they were when I was a teenager. I fear that is an unintended, but nonetheless real, consequence of enhanced media exposure. I regularly give thought as to how to tweak the way I do things to blunt that kind of influence.
As usual, comments are welcome on this article. I have tried very hard to present this issue in a way that gives all sides something worthwhile to think about, but that is far from suggesting that I've said all that is worthwhile there is to be said on the topic. Please understand that any comments that flirt with the edges of libel will be deleted. As a general rule, it's a very good idea to be using a transparent screen name when commenting on an issue like this.
Probably no issue in high school sports should engender as much discussion among us as much as the issue of students attending a school outside of their own attendance boundaries. You can make your case for PEDs as the most important topic of discussion, but open enrollment threatens to change the landscape of high school sports far more quickly, and possibly even more decisively, than PEDs.
We have had recent open enrollment discussions in cross country, and we have had them in track and field. Yet even so, we have probably had fewer of those discussions than any of football, wrestling, volleyball, baseball, and basketball have had.