PIAA board targets midseason transfers with new rule

By: HSSN Staff
Sunday, March 25, 2018 | 10:39 PM

Midseason transfers will be declared ineligible under a rule the PIAA board of directors is poised to approve Monday.

Under the new restrictions, if an athlete switches teams after already completing half of the season at a previous school, “the student will be deemed to have participated in an entire season and, following the transfer, will not be eligible for further participation in that sport.”

The cutoff is 50 percent of the maximum number of regular-season contests allowed.

The amendment to Article VI of the PIAA bylaws is listed on Monday's board meeting agenda. This would be the third and final vote needed to approve the rule.

It comes on the heels of recent high-profile midseason transfers, notably football star Micah Parsons' switch from Central Dauphin to Harrisburg two years ago. Parsons, who's now at Penn State, transferred and played the final two regular season games at Harrisburg in 2016. His arrival led the team to the PIAA Class 5A finals.

Just this winter, the Neumann-Goretti girls basketball team added a high-scoring, late-season transfer from Virginia. Point guard Diamond Johnson played 19 games and averaged 33 points for Phoebus High School in Virginia before transferring to the Philadelphia Catholic school in February, according to the Newport News Daily Press, which had named her that newspaper's girls basketball player of the year for the 2016-17 season.

Neumann-Goretti, which added Johnson to its postseason lineup, plays WPIAL champion Bishop Canevin in the PIAA Class 3A finals Monday in Hershey.

If approved, the new PIAA rule would allow midseason transfers to request an eligibility waiver from a district committee. In District 7, that would be the WPIAL board of directors.

A district committee may grant a waiver if “the transfer was not materially motivated by an athletic purpose and the transfer was necessitated by exceptional and unusual circumstances that compelled a transfer prior to the end of the season.”

However, the rule's language states that “transfers to address academic needs and desires, or for social reasons, are not considered exceptional and compelling circumstances.”

Chris Harlan is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at charlan@tribweb.com or via Twitter @CHarlan_Trib.