Proposed legislation seeks to streamline transfer appeals for Nevada high school athletes

Editor's note: Este artículo está traducido al español.

CARSON CITY — A Nevada Assembly bill that would standardize the transfer and hardship appeals processes for high school athletes in Nevada could have made a difference for the Koech family.

Usila Koech’s son, Kipruto, was a cross country runner for the private Bishop Gorman High School as an 11th-grader, but in 2023, the family chose to send him to public school after his grandmother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The family couldn’t afford her treatments, traveling to her home in Kenya to oversee her care, and Kipruto’s tuition.

Because the rules of the Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association generally require students to sit out a year after transferring, the Koechs sought waivers at the end of Kipruto’s junior year so he could run cross country and track his senior year at Desert Oasis High School.

When the Clark County School District denied their request, they appealed to the Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association. Usila Koech said she produced medical and financial documents showing that the family’s challenges pushed them to transfer her son to public school.

The NIAA, a nonprofit that governs high school sports, denied the appeal, leaving the young distance runner ineligible to compete during his senior year.

“Adults have gotten in the way,” Usila Koech said. “That’s supposed to be fun for kids.”

At a hearing last month for her Assembly Bill 184, Assemblymember Natha Anderson, D-Sparks, said the NIAA didn’t always follow its own regulations. NIAA hearings often don’t take place until a season is over, and people are hesitant to speak out about adverse experiences with the organization, she told the Assembly Committee on Education.

The proposed legislation from Anderson, who is a high school teacher, would allow students to appeal the hearing officer’s denial of their transfer request with their district school board within 30 days of the decision.

“By taking out some of the guesswork, AB 184 will provide more consistency and less subjectivity, hopefully removing a perceived bias against a particular school or child and allowing decisions to be made upon state law, not arbitrarily or due to ‘I know somebody,’ ” Anderson said.

AB 184 would call for the NIAA to grant eligibility to transfers who switched schools under certain circumstances, such as being the victim of verified bullying or assault that was likely to continue if the student didn’t transfer.

Students would also immediately gain eligibility if transferring schools is in the best interests of their mental health or emotional condition. That condition must be documented by a letter from a psychologist, physician or school counselor; or if the student’s immediate family is experiencing documented financial hardship.

The proposal, which wasn’t voted on and could be amended, would prohibit the NIAA from considering where students live, or their attendance zone, when determining eligibility. That means athletes transferring from a public school to another public school wouldn’t have to live within the school’s boundaries.

The bill additionally calls on students to be immediately eligible if they transfer before 10th grade, or if they transfer to a school that uses a lottery system for admissions. A lottery system is prevalent at charter or magnet schools.

Coaches throughout the state have reservations about the bill’s ramifications, worrying it paves the way for athletes with no hardship to leave one program to join a powerhouse team at another school.

Tim Jackson, the executive director of the NIAA, and his assistant director Cate Sgroi told lawmakers the bill was unnecessary and largely duplicated existing regulations while reducing the organization’s ability to adapt.

Sgroi said provisions classifying mental health and financial concerns as automatic hardship justifications could give families an opportunity to skirt regulations that give the NIAA the ability, in the name of fairness, to investigate if those hardships truly exist.

She also said the established appeal timeline is based on when parents submit their child’s transfer request, with initial determination in under a week; if parents promptly begin the process, an initial waiver and appeal can be resolved within about five weeks, she said.

In an interview, Jackson said he preferred NIAA’s own proposed solution, which has gotten initial approval from the NIAA board and is pending approval by legislative staff. The potential regulation amendment, which has been in the works for almost two years, allows students one transfer during their high school years without the burden of the waiver and appeals process.

“We heard it loud and clear that they needed to have that — that that’s what the students needed, that’s what our schools needed, and that’s what we’ve been working on,” he said. “We believe we have a really good regulation ready to go.”

Jackson said that the existing waiver and appeals timeline was fine, and the length can be based on the parties’ ability to get their information together. Adding a higher appellate layer would make the process longer and put it on bodies that might not be as familiar with high school sports regulations, he said.

Current regulations sufficiently ban recruiting, he said.

He said there were intricacies and unique facts in every eligibility determination, so the NIAA takes its time to do them correctly and equitably.

Alex Velto is a Reno lawyer whose primary practice is in labor and litigation, but he’s carved out a specialty in representing students at NIAA appeal hearings. He characterized the hearings as contentious minitrials, with teenagers having to testify about potentially traumatic experiences.

“One of the big problems that I see through this hearing process is you have a student who may have been bullied or tormented at their prior school, and as a result of that, they have to seek out a therapist,” he said. “The NIAA does not just accept a letter from a therapist, so they put the onus on the parents to not only have an attorney to try to advocate in the hearing, but also to bring the therapist.”

Velto challenged the notion that parents take too long to seek waivers. Bullying cases, for example, may require mid-semester transfers.

He said he understood that existing transfer rules were generally to prevent schools from stacking their rosters with recruited star players, but some kids who just want to play and not be highly competitive for championships were left out.

Rich Muraco, the varsity football coach for the perennial powerhouse Liberty High School, said sports eligibility wasn’t an easy topic. He said the bill sounded like a one-time transfer more for freshmen than older kids, and has more benefit for charter and magnet schools because of the lottery provision.

Liberty, a CCSD school, doesn’t have magnet programs nor does it accept optional transfers because its enrollment, in a densely populated and growing part of the southeast Las Vegas Valley, is over capacity.

He said the bill could only benefit Liberty if students transferred in but already lived in the Liberty attendance zone. CCSD must allow them to register at their zoned neighborhood school even if it’s full.

“We’re in a situation now where certain schools are going to struggle,” Muraco said.

Velto said not every problem had a potential remedy in the rules right now.

High school sports statutes are short and don’t clearly define hardship, he said. Because this is addressed under code, it leaves the interpretation up to the NIAA, he said. Moving it to statute would make it more clear-cut.

“I think that’s where ideally, this bill makes the cases I do on the NIAA obsolete,” Velto said.

Jackson said it was unfair to characterize the NIAA as adversarial.

“I don’t think we wake up in the morning to think up new ways to make it more difficult for kids to participate,” he said. “Our goal is to have our students participate at the school they’re zoned for or allowed to attend based on our regulations. If we don’t have kids participating, we don’t have an association.”

Finding a way

Ulisa Koech found an alternative to the typical high school framework for her son. A coach at Desert Oasis worked with Kipruto in the winter off-season to prepare him for the New Balance Nationals indoor meet, an experience that would make him appealing to a college program. Because Nevada doesn’t have indoor track at the high school level, Kipruto was not competing in an NIAA-sanctioned sport that was subject to the organization’s eligibility rules.

Kipruto was able to get the time he needed in the mile run to be a walk-on at the University of New Mexico, where he is a freshman premed student. Koech proudly said he can run a mile in 4 minutes, 14 seconds.

Sports opens doors and children benefit just from being on a team, Ulisa Koech said.

Ulisa Koech, a runner herself who competed for UNLV, said she grew up in a Kenyan village without running water and sometimes had no shoes. She wants to help others and push for NIAA reforms, knowing that not every young athlete has the resources that she did for her son.

“We are very forgiving people,” she said, “but we will always fight.”