“The old school part of me think it’s kind of a sad thing now to do that (transfer),” San Dimas High School football coach Bill Zernickow said when he heard the rule had passed. “But being a parent, I guess it’s good and empowering that you can take your child wherever you want them to go to school. Being a dad myself, I can see the benefit of that.”

By Aram Tolegian, SGVN twitter.com/ChemicalAT
A series of new transfer rule proposals, including the controversial 30-day sit-out rule, were passed by the CIF State Federated Council on Friday and will go into effect on July 1.

The proposals were approved at the Southern Section council meeting in late April, but that only got them a little more than halfway in the weighted vote needed to pass at the state level. The other nine sections that make up the state took care of the rest and on Friday the rules were passed at the State Federated Council meeting in Milpitas.

San Dimas’ league, the Valle Vista, was one of several local leagues to vote against the loosely labeled 30-day sit-out portion of the proposals at last month’s Southern Section Council meeting. In fact, that series of the proposals was barely approved by the Southern Section Council after a 41-40 vote of the 81 leagues who voted during the meeting. (To continue click thread)

“The old school part of me think it’s kind of a sad thing now to do that (transfer),” San Dimas High School football coach Bill Zernickow said when he heard the rule had passed.

“But being a parent, I guess it’s good and empowering that you can take your child wherever you want them to go to school. Being a dad myself, I can see the benefit of that.”

The new rules will allow for all athletes who transfer with a valid change of address to gain immediate eligibility. For those who don’t change addresses, they will be forced to sit out 30-35 days, depending on the date of their transfer.

The previous penalty for transferring without a valid residential change or if the transfer was challenged by the previous school and proven to be “athletically motivated” was the athlete would sit out an entire calendar year before regaining varsity eligibility.

The fear among the new rules’ detractors is that sitting out only a month will invite an environment of rampant transfers and whatever level of loyalty to the neighborhood school that currently exists will drop even further.

Supporters of the rule mostly felt that the previous penalty of sitting out a calendar year was too harsh and that the determination of what’s athletically motivated and what isn’t was too subjective.

The proposals to drastically overhaul the previous transfer rules came from the state level and were streamlined through by the various sections in order to have them up for vote during the final section council meetings of this school year. The speediness of the process left some administrators unclear on many of the details of the new rules.

For now, this much is clear, any athlete who transfers without a valid residential change after the new rules take effect on July 1 will be eligible for varsity competition in fall sports on Oct. 1.