Lawmakers in both chambers agree that loosening transfer rules for student athletes was a mistake. A bill to nullify the rule is advancing quickly.
House Bill 4425 repeals a bill passed just three years ago to allow students to transfer schools without losing eligibility to play sports.
Tuesday the Senate Education Committee heard testimony about the real-world effects on school athletics necessitating changes to mercy rules in softball, soccer and football.
Wayne Ryan, executive director of the West Virginia Secondary Schools Athletic Commission (SSAC), confirmed that the state has seen more than 1,200 student transfers for athletics over the past three years, an average of 400 student transfers per year.
“That’s only what we can verify through the schools completing the survey to us,” he said. “I assure you some schools didn’t list every transfer they got that was playing a sport because they wanted to try to keep their numbers down just a little bit here and there, I assure you of that.”
Ryan told the committee that despite a desire to address glaring issues with transfers, the commission’s hands have been tied by the 2023 bill, House Bill 2820.
“It’s currently in state code and state law, and so we have followed state law for three years in state code, and it’s really taken it out of our hands,” he said. “It was in our hands up to that point. We really didn’t see a big issue in 2022 but the school choice did become a factor in why we thought it was a good time to make a change.
Ryan emphasized that the bill has led to a loss of what he called “competitive balance” across multiple sports, has disrupted communities and fostered animosity between communities.
“They’re upset because they’re getting displaced, or they’re getting accomplishments that they don’t feel genuine about,” he said. “Now we’ve got schools against schools, and we’ve hurt relations. We’ve hurt coach to coach relation, administrator to administrator relations and community to community. So there’s been a lot of instability that it’s created, and we would like the opportunity to fix it.”
Sen. Rollan Roberts, a Republican from Raleigh County, commended the bill for embodying his belief that the legislature can always “come back and fix it.”
HB 2820 is summarized on the legislature’s website as a bill “to provide HOPE Scholarship recipients with the ability to play sports.” School choice advocates in the legislature envisioned the bill as easing homeschooler’s access to extracurriculars. But even staunch school choice advocates such as Roberts acknowledge the current transfer situation is not tenable.
He expressed concern the repeal didn’t fix the issue and merely handed the question back to a school athletics commission whose inaction forced legislative intervention in the first place.
“If we do the repeal and the SSAC doesn’t straighten it out and give some wiggle room in these areas, we’re going to be right back into the legislature in a few years,” Roberts said. “We got data now. We know what happened, and if we don’t capitalize on that, if this goes back into the SSAC’s pocket, then I will just say you need to get it right, and right is better than what it used to be. Repeal takes us back there, but you should not take us back there. We don’t want to repeat history with that.”
House Bill 4425 was recommended to the Senate for passage.
