A Matter of Common Sense

High School Swimming participation is governed by 50 different sets of rules. "Shouldn’t the overriding question be what’s best for the swimmers?"

For nearly a century, state high school activities associations have been placing limits on coaches and athletes. But what about limits on the associations?  More specifically, should they be directing how people spend their free time?

By Tom Slear, Special Splash Correspondent
Splash Magazine: Nov-Dec, 2003
(Taken from www.usaswimming.org  Articles & Resources archives)

At first glance it seems so intrusive, so blatantly unfair. Rachael Waller, who swims for the Kansas City Blazers, would also like to swim for the girl’s team at her high school. But the rules of the Missouri State High School Activities Association (MSHSAA) force her to make a choice: high school or club, but not both. Come the first day of high school practice, which for girl swimmers in Missouri is in the spring, Waller must sever all ties to the Kansas City Blazers until after the state championship at the end of May. For roughly 12 weeks she can’t train or compete with the Blazers. 

Though Missouri is arguably the most limiting, it’s hardly unique. To one degree or another, many other states restrict training and competition. (Unlike colleges and the NCAA, high school sports have no national regulation.) Some permit practice outside what the high school offers, but say no to competitions. Others divide sports into categories of team and individual and allow “dual participation” in one or the other.  A few preclude club practices, but have inserted a convenient loophole in the form of “individualized instruction.”

The tether to coaches is even more pronounced. The vast majority of states prohibit high school coaches from training their athletes out of season, which, as a practical matter, rules out club coaching for high school coaches and vice versa. (This assumes, of course, that the rules are enforced. Some states – Missouri, Illinois, and Massachusetts, for example – are strict. Others are less so. )

“In some states, the rules are enforced,” says Randy Julian, USA Swimming’s sport development coordinator for the Central Zone. “In other states, it’s a shell game.”)

ARBITRARY AND UN-AMERICAN

Waller, now a junior, elected to pass on high school swimming and stay with the Blazers. Her mother, Kathy, was baffled, though not by her daughter’s decision. Kathy Waller failed to see the need for any sort of decision at all. What right did MSHSAA have to regulate her daughter’s free time? Rachael planned to attend all of the high school practices and meets. How could anyone find fault if she wanted to do more than was required? The dual participation rule was not only arbitrary, Waller believes, but also, well, downright un-American.

“If the athletes are getting good grades and trying to improve themselves, why, in the United States, can’t they train extra?” she asks, summarizing her motivation for getting involved in the long-standing administrative, legal and legislative efforts to bring about a change. “I don’t think anyone has the right to tell kids how they can spend their free time, especially if they are meeting all of the coach’s requirements.”

A solution seems so simple: Remove the rule, or at least modify it. Waller suggests something along the lines of allowing athletes to train with whomever they would like, provided they meet all of the demands of the school team.

If only it were that easy. Despite what their mission statements say, state athletic associations, many of which have been around in one form or another for nearly a century, exist primarily to run championships and to regulate athletes. Most of these regulations help to ensure something akin to a level playing field and are widely accepted. For example, not many parents want their high-school-age children lining up on the basketball court against 25-year-olds (the age limit in most states is 18), and even fewer want professionals competing no matter what their ages.

Other rules get general support, though they also generate a fair amount of discussion and a good number of appeals, such as those specifying academic minimums or prohibiting athletically motivated transfers.

A MODICUM OF SENSE

Then there are the rules that cause parents and athletes to shake their heads in wonder. In isolation, perhaps, these rules defy reason, but in context, they make at least a modicum of sense. The limits on coaches interacting with their high school athletes out of season might seem needlessly constraining, yet they keep year-round programs at arm’s length. School administrators see an inevitable progression from high school coaches setting up club teams to the requirement for high school athletes to train out of season.

Some athletes would thrive in that environment, but many “just need a break, both from the coach and the sport,” says Tom Shafranski, assistant director of the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association.

“Developing the elite, blue-chip athlete is not part of our mission," says Paul Wetzel, spokesperson for the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association (MIAA).  "Our mission is to have the high school (athletic) program within the educational context.  Training Olympic athletics is not what we are about.”

What parents and athletes often miss, Wetzel adds, is that state athletic associations don’t create requirements. Rather, they reflect the wishes of principals, athletic directors and coaches speaking for many different sports. Achieving consensus is rarely a smooth process. Some illogical outcomes are inevitable. But in general, Wetzel says, the associations give back to the schools what they want.

Until eight years ago, high school athletes in Massachusetts could arrange with the coaches how much they would train and compete for school teams. With the better club swimmers, these negotiations were mostly one-sided affairs. “See you at the state championships,” they would tell the coaches, introducing themselves to their teammates the day of the meet.

“There were two seasons,” says Wetzel,“one with the swimmers who regularly went to practices and dual meets, and the other with the club all-stars who would win most of the races at the championships.”

The rule still permits swimmers, or athletes in any sport, for that matter, to stay aligned with their club teams during the high school season as long as it doesn’t cause them to miss any school practices or meets. This is basically what Waller is after, with one important distinction. She would have the coach or the school determine what an athlete can miss. In Massachusetts, that decision rests with the MIAA, which, according to Wetzel, is the way coaches and athletic directors want it.

“They would much rather have the MIAA say no,” he says. “Then they aren’t the ones who have to live with the parents.”

INTRINSIC VALUE

Kevin Fober, the athletic director and swimming coach at DeSmet Jesuit High School in Missouri, has mixed feelings over Waller’s proposal. He sympathizes with swimmers torn between representing their high schools and missing the training routines with their club teams. But he also sees intrinsic value to high school swimming – the camaraderie, the head-to-head competition, the ethos of team over self – and wonders if three months away from a club team is that much of a price to pay. Perhaps something else is in play.

“I hear from the club perspective that if a kid does swim high school, it holds him back,” Fober says. “There is the perception that in some way high school swimming is second class, and I dispute that.”

With scarce pool time and swim coaches appointed as afterthoughts, the plain fact is that swimming is second-class at many high schools. As Lauren Duenke, a finalist in last spring’s Missouri state championships who now swims for the University of Missouri, observes, “It’s a situation they would never allow if it were football or basketball.”

Chris Murphy, the coach at the school Rachael Waller attends, has to squeeze as many as 50 swimmers into four lanes at a 25-yard community pool. To compensate, he puts those who can handle faster intervals into the outer edges of the two lanes reserved for diving; or if he is lucky enough to find them unoccupied, into the lanes set aside for recreational swimmers.

Nick Rudich, head national and national prep coach at Parkway Swim Club in St. Louis, had of one of his swimmers, a freshman, make the commitment to swim for her high school only to have the coach show up for practice the first day a half hour late and tell the team, “I’m new at this, so you and I will learn together.” The swimmer was back with Rudich that evening.

Becca Dawson, a former Missouri state record-holder who now attends the University of Missouri on a swimming scholarship, considers herself fortunate to have had a good high school coach.
“There were only a handful of them in the state, and we all knew who they were,” she says. “My decision to swim high school would have been a lot more tricky if the coach wasn’t so good.”

Fober is one among that handful. He coached 10 years at the University of Chicago before following his wife’s career move to St. Louis. He is endorsed by Travis Beckerle, a distance swimmer at the University of Minnesota who was seventh in the Big Ten in the 1,650 last year as a freshman and qualified for the NCAA championships.

Beckerle did it both ways in high school – swimming for Fober his freshman and junior years and for his club team his sophomore and senior years. On the surface, he’s irrefutable evidence supporting less restrictive rules regarding practices and competitions beyond the high school program.  Though he thought Fober trained the swimmers well, the longest high school race is the 500y freestyle (there are no 200-yard stroke races and no 400-yard individual medley, either). Beckerle felt he needed the practices with his club that focused more on distance.  When he didn’t get them his junior year, his 1,650 swims suffered. Under a different set of rules, he’s confident he and Fober could have accommodated one another, with Beckerle attending four out of the eight high school practices and training the rest of the time with his club team.

Though Fober recognized Beckerle’s special situation, he never would have gone along with such an arrangement.

“I want full participation,” Fober says. “If someone wants to double up and go to club team practices in addition to the high school practices, I don’t have a problem with that. But I don’t see the purpose of being on a team if a kid just shows up a minimum number of times.”

Even with a less restrictive rule, Beckerle would have faced a difficult decision, and not only concerning whether to cut back on club training to attend all of the high school practices. What would he have done when Fober tapered the practices in anticipation of the state championships and his club coach kept the yardage up to maintain conditioning for Nationals a couple of months later?

This type of conflict is hardly limited to swimming. The Virginia High School League had a rule as restrictive as MSHSAA’s until parents of soccer players lobbied the legislature in the early 1990s. Now there are few limits to outside participation, and it’s the coaches who are upset. “You might have someone pitch five innings on Sunday for a traveling team,” says Larry Johnson, an assistant director for the VHSL. “Then the high school coach can’t use him on Monday or Tuesday as planned.”

AGE-OLD PROBLEM

While he was building a national power at Illinois’ New Trier High School in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Ray Essick, the former executive director of USA Swimming, riled over state association rules. He suspected that a few were motivated by jealousy of New Trier’s success. He saw the state association as dictatorial, its actions dominated by the wishes of football coaches. The approach was one-size-fits-all with no allowances for the differences between swimming and football, or track and basketball.

“It’s an age-old problem, nothing new,” Essick says. “With no rules there’s a mess. With too many rules, it’s a mess of another sort. But you can’t argue the point that the state associations have every right to make rules. And you have to remember that it’s a privilege to play a high school sport, not a right.”

State courts, citing reasoning remarkably similar to Essick’s, have time and again sided with the athletic associations. In a recent case brought by a swimmer in Missouri over the dual participation rule, the state appeals court concluded that while the justices might not agree with the rule, MSHSAA had the right to make it.

Being legal, however, doesn’t necessarily equate to making sense. As Waller points out, what high school principal in the country would discourage a student from taking extra math classes at night? What activities director would say no when the editor of the school newspaper asks to freelance for the local weekly?

“It’s a family decision, not a school decision,” she says. “It should be up to the parents, ultimately, as to what their sons and daughters want to take on outside of school time.”

In a rough sense the same applies to the coaches. If they want to get involved with club teams, some members of which might also swim for them at their high schools, what gives state associations the right to say no, especially if that means money out of the coaches’ pockets?

Shouldn’t the overriding question be what’s best for the swimmers? And wouldn’t that be high schools populated by experienced, knowledgeable coaches and rules that don’t impede development to the highest level?