Lawmakers, principals, AD's, coaches agree: IHSAA transfer system is broken; fix coming?
INDIANAPOLIS – The IHSAA can break your heart, but it doesn’t have to be this way. The people there, they don’t have to make the occasional decision that borders on barbaric. They could spend more of their time on worthier causes, and let’s be clear: The IHSAA does immerse itself in worthy causes.
More often than not, the IHSAA is doing something good for kids in our state. Some of its work is so obvious, so normal, we might take it for granted – like partnering with the Colts, Pacers and Indiana’s universities to hold state championship events in world-class facilities. Other things don’t get that kind of attention. Like scholarships and grants totaling almost $100,000 to 66 high school seniors in 2021, and an increased focus on sportsmanship and community service.
But the system breaks down when it comes to the singular issue of transfers, and this is not unique to Indiana. State high school associations across America are grappling with this. In Ohio, for example, kids are allowed one “free” transfer – meaning, without losing eligibility – if the student-athlete is transferring into his or her school district. Imagine a Cathedral volleyball or football player transferring to Beech Grove and playing immediately, because they already live in the Beech Grove district.
In West Virginia, state legislators passed this spring a one-time transfer rule akin to college sports. Similar “transfer portal” legislation was proposed but not passed in Texas. The transfer topic is big and complicated, and getting more unwieldy.
“The most explosive issue we face today? Transfers,” says Karissa Niehoff, executive director of the National Federation of State High School Associations, which offers guidance on national issues from its headquarters in downtown Indianapolis.
“Transfers,” Niehoff says again, “and the way they’re appealed.”
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An Indiana lawmaker wants the IHSAA to adopt a one-time transfer rule similar to West Virginia – and he wants more than that. Rep. Bob Morris, R-Fort Wayne, would like the Indiana Department of Education to assume oversight of the IHSAA, similar to the setup in Maryland and Delaware.
“The people of my district elect me to office to watch out for them,” Morris tells me, “and the IHSAA is an organization I have many questions for – and I want a lot of answers from.”
There is anger at the Statehouse, on both sides of the aisle and in both chambers of the Indiana General Assembly – Sen. Andrea Hunley, D-Indianapolis, suggests the IHSAA system “is not working” – and that anger, just like those lawmakers, represents our state.
People around Indiana appear overwhelmingly to be fed up with the way the IHSAA handles transfers, but all that anger – which bubbles to the surface every time the IHSAA makes another heartless transfer decision – hasn’t led to real change. That’s why you’re reading this story.
Let’s do more than complain about the IHSAA.
Let’s try to fix the thing.
Good ol' boy network
But let’s complain first, for those who don’t yet understand the problem.
At its best, as I’ve said, the IHSAA makes sense of the complex world of high school sports. It oversees roughly 90,000 athletes in 20 sports, all dreaming of playing in a state championship venue like Lucas Oil Stadium (football), Gainbridge Fieldhouse (basketball, wrestling), IU Natatorium (swimming), Purdue’s Bittinger Stadium (softball) and Victory Field (baseball). The IHSAA also offers unified state championships for flag football and track.
But at its worst, the IHSAA is a good ol’ boys network reeking of cronyism, bad faith and the occasional fracture of federal law.
IHSAA commissioner Paul Neidig doesn’t see it that way, but says he’s open to ideas that could improve the association.
“I stay awake at nights wondering how we can do things better,” he says.
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That’s Neidig in a nutshell: Bulletproof soundbites, but flaccid follow-through.
Neidig comes across as thoughtful and softspoken, a leisurely gentleman from southern Indiana. His quiet, self-confident charm is no doubt devastating when he visits the Statehouse to make sure that good ol’ boy network leaves his alone. But left to its own devices for so long, with no real outside oversight and little self-awareness, the IHSAA has evolved to the point where it doesn’t recognize what it has become.
The IHSAA Board of Directors, for example, has 18 members that are broken down into three groups:
Two Black men, helpfully designated on the IHSAA website as the board’s “minority” members.
Two white women, designated as “female.”
The other 14 members, unmoored by quotas? Fourteen white males.
A spot on the IHSAA board, especially for a board member who keeps the machinery moving, offers an inside track to a lucrative landing spot later. Seven of the IHSAA’s nine commissioners since 1929 got their foot in the door on the board of directors, including Neidig, formerly at Evansville Central. More than a dozen assistant or associate commissioners also started on the board of directors, including two on staff now – Robert Faulkens (Crispus Attucks) and Ed Gilliland (LaPorte).
Estimated annual salary for a principal in Indianapolis: $108,000. Annual compensation for most IHSAA assistant commissioners, according to 2021 IHSAA tax filings: $165,547.
One Central Indiana principal told me she has considered running for the Board of Directors – the board is elected by a vote of principals – but not for the six-figure coast into retirement. She has no interest in checking the IHSAA’s “female” box, either. What she’d like is to give the board a third female voice, but fears payback if she falls short.
“It’s a good old boys’ club,” she told me, speaking freely on the condition I don’t name her. “I don’t want to put a target on my school.”
Said another high-ranking school official in Central Indiana, the head coach of a ranked Class 6A football team: “Absolutely, people are afraid of the IHSAA – 100%.”
Not fair, Neidig said, when I told him of the fear of IHSAA retribution among its membership. But what does that say about your organization, I asked, that some people actually feel that way?
“Well,” he says, softly and thoughtfully, “I think about these things every day.”
Transfer system rigged against kids
A kid ruled ineligible by the IHSAA after a transfer can appeal the decision to the same organization that issued it, which means arriving at the offices at 9150 N. Meridian St. and being led into a conference room where tables have been rearranged for maximum effect. The family is on one side of the U-shaped layout, looking across the room not just at officials from the school the kid is leaving, but at the people sitting next to those school officials – Neidig and the IHSAA associate commissioner prosecuting the case. The IHSAA review board, chosen by the IHSAA and seated at the bottom of the “U,” is reminded of its purpose here by the imagery of the commissioner aligned with the school, opposite the kid.
Used to be, the kid’s family could have a lawyer in the room. Imagine being a teenager taking on the IHSAA, or the parents: The room is intimidating, the process terrifying, the impact on the kid’s future undeniable. One lawyer in particular, Michael Jasaitis of Crown Point, routinely represents kids and families against the IHSAA and is responsible for dozens of overturned decisions.
The IndyStar wrote in February 2021 about Jasaitis’ impact. The IHSAA’s response? A new bylaw written four months later:
No more attorneys in the appeal room.
I asked Neidig: Why?
“I didn’t want the financial obligation to families,” he said.
You’re doing them a favor?
“My attempt there was to not put a financial burden on families,” he said. “I didn’t want anyone to feel like they had to have an attorney in that room.”
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The soundbite is strong, but the follow-through flaccid. Because that’s not what the new bylaw actually says. Rule 17-4.5 states in part: “To make each Review Committee more informal and less intimidating,” attorneys are prohibited at the Review Committee hearings, but “the (IHSAA’s) Review Committee reserves the right to consult with its own counsel at any time.”
Says Jasaitis: “Denying counsel makes these hearings exponentially more difficult for these families who are first-time participants trying to present their case. It puts them at a significant disadvantage against experienced IHSAA leaders.”
When a kid requests an appeal of the IHSAA’s initial decision, Neidig sends the family a letter reiterating the basis for the initial ruling – and then asks the family, after considering the information in his letter, if they still wish to appeal the decision.
Imagine being a mom or dad and getting that letter. It comes across as a warning shot, I tell Neidig.
“That’s not the intent,” he says.
But can’t you see it from their perspective?
“I have to see how it looks,” he says, another good soundbite signifying nothing.
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'Not saying we are the messiah'
“I know this,” he says. “I couldn’t walk in this door and do my job if I felt we weren’t giving everybody a fair opportunity. There’s nobody that sits here and says, ‘How can we screw this family today?’ It’s never a goal, it never has been a goal, and I’m a farce in education if I ever operate this business that way – a farce – and shouldn’t have been doing this a long, long time ago. And you may agree that I shouldn’t have been.
“But I can tell you I’ve got countless families and students and people that I’ve worked with all my career that will tell you I’ve been a pretty fair person my entire career.”
I tell him I’ve received so many emails to the contrary – from parents, teachers, coaches and school administrators, all calling him or his organization unfair, complete with damning details – that I’ve created an email folder called “IHSAA” to keep track. I’ve saved every one of them, I tell Neidig. I could write a book. Maybe I should.
“We always can get better,” Neidig says. “I’m not sitting here saying we are the messiah. I’m sitting here saying we have a system that can be changed, and there’s a mechanism for change, and it should be used when it’s appropriate to do so.”
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An appeal that winds through every legal avenue available to the kid starts with a rejection by the IHSAA’s review board – little more than a rubber stamp for the IHSAA’s original decision – and then goes to the independent and more open-minded Case Review Panel, administered by the Indiana Department of Education.
If the Case Review Panel upholds the IHSAA’s original ruling, the family is left to pursue one last legal remedy: an injunction in court. Several state judges have issued such an injunction, including one scathing critique of the IHSAA’s transfer process as “bullying,” “insulting” and “condescending.”
But such a victory comes with potential peril. If the injunction is later found by a higher court to have been issued erroneously, the school must forfeit games and return gate receipts from any contest in which the kid played. The IHSAA can even argue that the family reimburse its attorney fees.
Call all of this what it is: various forms of intimidation, an unspoken question over and over from the IHSAA to families in Indiana:
You really want to challenge us?
McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act
Several years ago the IHSAA made a transfer ruling that ran afoul of common sense and decency, which happens routinely, but in this case the IHSAA ruling also ran afoul of federal law.
The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, passed in 1987 by the U.S. Department of Education, allows homeless students to attend the school of their choice, with immediate access to extracurricular activities like sports. The IHSAA ruled a kid ineligible despite her recent homelessness in 2020, and even as neither school in question – the sending school or receiving school, as they’re called – had found the move to be athletically motivated, per the Case Review Panel decision that overturned the IHSAA.
Neidig says the IHSAA hadn’t been aware of the kid’s home situation, telling me that in the same conversation where he’d defended IHSAA rulings in general by saying "we search for the truth" behind the scenes, calling the involved parties for relevant information. All of it sounded good, as Neidig’s answers tend to do.
The truth, though, is uglier – as the truth tends to be, when the IHSAA is involved.
According to the Case Review Panel’s reversal of Neidig’s original ruling and review board's rubber stamp, “The (IHSAA) Assistant Commissioner admitted (they) never contacted the Petitioner’s family to discuss the transfer with them or gather additional information from the family.”
Oh.
The Case Review Panel also reprimanded the IHSAA for malfeasance beyond its ignorance of McKinney-Vento implications.
“There is no evidence in the record that the move was athletically motivated,” the panel wrote. “The Panel would remind the Review Committee that facts matter. … The Panel has repeatedly reminded the Review Committee of these basic evidentiary principals to no avail.”
The IHSAA also ran afoul of the McKinny-Vento law in 2016, when Bobby Cox was commissioner and personally ruled against a kid transferring to North Daviess. The kid had been rendered homeless by his parents’ drug addiction, then moved in with a grandfather so ill he could barely walk, and dropped out of school to care for him. The kid obtained a GED, and returned to North Daviess to complete his high school experience, which included basketball.
Cox ruled against the kid, citing his year as a dropout as “redshirting,” a hair-raising decision overturned by the Case Review Panel as “arbitrary and capricious and a violation of Petitioner's rights under and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and Article 1 Section 23 of the Indiana Constitution.”
Who oversees the IHSAA anyway?
Neither Gov. Eric Holcomb nor the Indiana Department of Education wants to get involved – not publicly, anyway. Not yet. I emailed both offices for help, for ideas, for conversation. The responses from two different spokespeople:
“IDOE does not have oversight of the IHSAA,” read one. “IDOE’s involvement is limited to the administration of the Case Review Panel.”
“It would be inappropriate for the governor to comment on this non-governmental organization,” read the other.
The IHSAA is a “non-governmental organization”? Not exactly true.
When the DOE-administered Case Review Panel rules on an IHSAA transfer case, it makes the ruling available on the in.gov state government website. And in those rulings – in every one of them, a dozen or more times a year – is the following language, emphasis mine:
“Although the IHSAA is a voluntary not-for-profit corporation and is not a public entity, its decisions with respect to student eligibility to participate in interscholastic athletic competition are considered a “state action” making the IHSAA analogous to a quasigovernmental entity. IHSAA v. Carlberg, 694 N.E.2d 222 (Ind. 1997), reh. den. (Ind. 1998).”
Two additional emails to the governor’s office, citing that specific language and another attempt at dialogue, were ignored.
So who does oversee the IHSAA? The schools. In that way the IHSAA is like the NCAA, which takes its cue from university presidents – turning their suggestions into proposed legislation to be voted upon by the full membership (all the schools, in other words).
The system works at the college level, where school presidents may be beholden to Nike and ESPN, but not to the NCAA. When presidents get upset with the NCAA, presidents try to change the NCAA.
At the IHSAA level, there is no such fearlessness. Almost a dozen school leaders in various positions – principal, athletic director, coach – told me, in so many words, what the Central Indiana principal and football coach had said above:
I don’t want to put a target on my school.
Absolutely, people are afraid of the IHSAA – 100%.
The IHSAA rolls along, unimpeded by its members, as the anger around Indiana rises.
Does anyone have the will to fix the IHSAA?
Members of the state legislature are watching the IHSAA, and they're not happy.
Morris, the Republican congressman from Fort Wayne, wrote IHSAA-related legislation this spring. He said his proposal for a one-time transfer came “too late in the session, but I will be filing that (in 2024). I’m trying to fine-tune it now.”
Hunley, the Democratic senator from Indianapolis – and a former IPS principal – is eager to see it.
“I’m interested in ensuring that students are able to be full participants in all aspects of school,” she says. “This means ensuring that students and parents have protected rights to express concerns, partner to find solutions when possible, and have a neutral body to which to air grievances when necessary. If our system is not working, then we need to take a closer look at the system.”
Morris is itching for a fight. Our conversation starts on background, with me wanting to know about his one-time transfer legislation, but as the conversation evolves and Morris’ emotion rises, he starts offering quotes. Unlike almost everyone else you ask about the IHSAA – the DOE, the governor, principals and athletic directors and coaches – the Republican congressman from Fort Wayne doesn’t fear a public showdown.
“The IHSAA is a quasi-organization that doesn’t know the student, doesn’t know the parent, doesn’t know anything about that student – but it’s going to tell that parent your kid cannot transfer? That’s wrong,” he says, "and you can quote me.”
Morris pauses.
“Here’s another you can use,” he says. “I’m not sure why many schools are even part of the IHSAA today. OK, I know the reason – they want to compete for the state title – but they’re so frustrated by the actions of the organization. It shouldn’t be this way.”
Morris adds: “I talk to Commissioner Neidig frequently. He takes my calls. We have a good, cordial conversation. But nothing has changed.”
Pause.
“Here’s another,” he says. “The IHSAA should be under the Department of Education, because ultimately the appeal ends up at the Department of Education. Why not start there off the bat? Why go to the IHSAA first?”
Morris concludes with four words that sound like a call to action – a request for support from the angry army he knows lurks silently in the background.
“I’m just getting started,” he says.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana doesn't like how the IHSAA handles transfers, so let's fix it
