This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Education has changed over the past 50-plus years. I should understand this, as a son of a former Michigan high school football coach who was presented a clipboard by other faculty members upon moving because he had broken a few of those objects over the heads of misbehaving physical education students.

Believing all high school athletes should play where they live is one of those stances that reveals my age. And in this era of open enrollment, having the Utah State Board of Education vote to ease transfer restrictions for athletes below the varsity level seems like only a minor departure from the current standards of the Utah High School Activities Association.

Even so, this move frightens me — and it should alarm anyone who cares about maintaining the values and traditions of high school sports in Utah.

Coaches these days have enough trouble doing their jobs without the threat of athletes moving out of their schools for whatever reason. They invest too much time and effort into their programs for too little reward, and now they'll have more issues to deal with than they already do.

The potential effect is a huge mess that undermines coaches who are trying to develop athletes in their systems and build stable programs. That's why I hope the UHSAA can appeal this month's vote in January when newly elected members join the school board, or the board will revisit the issue in a year or so. Preventing athletes from transferring if they've already competed in that sport at the varsity stage is of some consolation, but the new rules still are too liberal for me.

Especially at the high school level, the coaching profession deserves more support. What's more, lessons learned from discipline, adversity and teamwork in a program are valuable, as opposed to athletes' becoming conditioned to looking elsewhere for a solution.

Even having never lived in a rural area, I'm also an advocate of those community-based schools that would have trouble competing with urban charter schools, loading up with transfers from bigger programs nearby.

If not for the votes of several outgoing board members, those rules would have not have passed.

They believed strongly enough in the need for change that they disregarded the wishes of schools around the state that overwhelmingly opposed the new rules. Maybe that's an admirable push to the finish if their terms and an example of sticking to their beliefs. I view it more as a case ignoring the pleas of those involved in operating schools at the local level, who should be authorized to do so.

Oversight of the UHSAA by the school board is important; so is a push for more transparency of the association's work. But considering how the UHSAA was founded nearly 90 years ago for the purpose of administering athletics and activities and enabling the school board to focus on academics, it just doesn't make complete sense for the board to get more involved at this point.

In a system that was designed to support education-based athletics, the school board is unwittingly harming students' academic pursuits as well, by making it easier to move — even during a school year.

The UHSAA is a member-driven association, not an independent ruling body. The board of trustees represents a cross-section of schools and geographic areas, not the association itself.

And the UHSAA is good at what it does. The association should have been allowed to keep doing so, the way its trustees choose — and I hope that can still happen, somehow.

Twitter: @tribkurt