Football and Heat

This from C-J:

If the death last year of a Louisville-area football player isn't enough to move the Kentucky High School Athletic Association to action, maybe the recent wave of oppressive heat will be.

It's nearing one year since the death of 15-year-old Max Gilpin, the Pleasure Park Ridge High School football player who died of heat stroke last August. The inexcusable delay of Jefferson County Public Schools' investigation into the tragedy is old news by now.

There's another pressing issue at hand: how to implement changes to school athletic policy before football tryouts begin in July.

That's the charge of the KHSAA, and so far, with less than a month before players return to the field, they've failed to do it....

KHSAA transfer policy questioned

This from the Herald-Leader:

Power play: Teen athletes cry foul

...In more than 800 cases a year, the Kentucky High School Athletic Association decides whether kids who transfer from one school to another are eligible to play sports or must sit out for a year. The state has established one of the toughest transfer rules in the country to fight a damning history of recruiting abuses in a sports-hungry state where coaches and parents will go to extremes to get students on a team.

But the association is facing growing criticism from parents, legislators and some members of the Kentucky Board of Education, who say that the pendulum has swung too far. The KHSAA, they say, has too much power and too little oversight; its decisions are often arbitrary, take too long and, ultimately, find too many children ineligible to play.

The furor has put the KHSAA, which has overseen high school sports since 1917, at a
crossroads. The Kentucky Board of Education, which oversees it, last year created a Commission on Interscholastic Athletics that recommended that the eligibility determinations be quicker. And the legislature's Administrative Regulation Review Subcommittee, which approves all agency regulations, has demanded that the KHSAA change some of its controversial rules...