Athletes now get one free transfer, no questions asked and no "sit out" period. There's been some talk about working towards similar in Arizona.

Athletes now get one free transfer, no questions asked and no "sit out" period. There's been some talk about working towards similar in Arizona.

How do you view this?  Is this a good move, or is it caving in to the inevitable?

How do you view this?  Is this a good move, or is it caving in to the inevitable?

I don't like people telling parents where they can send their children to school. I thought this was merica 🇺🇸

The transfer topic has long been one of the most confused areas of debate. Open transferring aligns perfectly with the ideas of liberty and a free market. Mandating an equivalent distribution of players, who are thus not free to seek the best opportunities, and instead are stuck with what the government dictates, aligns with a socialist or communist approach.  And yet if you analyzed the political leanings of those in favor of, and those against, open transferring, I imagine the vast majority of people opposing the transferring (and supporting the government dictated pursuit of equivalent outcomes) are conservative and the vast majority of those supporting a free market for players to choose their best options identify as leftists. Ron DeSantis in Florida would be an exception to this. But, I suspect there are a great many Floridians who support DeSantis in every way except for this issue.

I guess you could explain this by saying conservatives want to conserve the old way of doing things etc. But it sure seems to me that, by far and away, the most contentious area of disagreement between conservatives and leftists revolves around supporting liberty and free markets. The left wants the government to maximally intervene so as to engineer equivalent outcomes (communism) and the right wants the opposite.

How do you view this?  Is this a good move, or is it caving in to the inevitable?

As it pertains to the Arizona situation, we've implemented three different transfer rules since 2000, all with the same goal of curtailing transfers. I think it'd be an understatement to say that the rules are not effective based on how fundamental school choice has been to our local education system (statewide open enrollment since 1994) and changing attitudes towards athletic transfers as a whole (the prevailing perception here is that the transfer rules only punish the kids impacted; that was not the case 15 years ago).

I've always been a believer that if you don't have any issue with a kid who's going to be the seventh runner on his new school's cross country team transferring then it's weird to get in a huff over a 3000-yard passer switching schools. I'll also note that since Arizona has been in a state of flux regarding population since I was a kid (my junior year of high school in 1998-99 the Agua Fria high school district on the westside of the Phoenix metro had one school; in 2025 they opened their sixth school) our sense of community is very unique compared to states with a more established, static population.