In 2018, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) instituted the Transfer Portal which created a uniform database in which coaches, athletes, and staff can easily see who is in the portal and who they can recruit to come to their school. Another groundbreaking change the portal made was allowing the athletes to not have to sit out a full year after transferring, giving a lot more incentive if one wished to transfer schools.
High school sports have similar rules nowadays where students must wait 90 school days before they are able to participate in a varsity sport. Students may also submit their name to the Nebraska School Activities Association (NSAA) by May 1st stating they intend to transfer to a different school to be able to participate immediately the next school year. In some special cases, students can make a case to the NSAA that they had to already missed a season for injury or another obstacle out of their control and be able to bypass the 90-day rule.
Recently the Nebraska High School “Transfer Portal” has become a topic of much debate on social media sites and other news sources. Some believe that more regulations should be put in place to hinder as many students as possible from moving schools for the purpose of making these high school sports “super-teams.”
In the 2024 Class A state football matchup between Westside and Millard South, over 50 percent of the starters for both teams had transferred from other schools. In fact, all of Millard South’s touchdowns were scored by a student that transferred in from another school. Millard South went on to win the championship. South was able to score over 49 points in every game except for one leading up to the State Championship.
“`A lot of people will claim that these public schools are going out and deliberately recruiting these students but none of the schools will ever admit to this as this would be against the NSAA’s regulations. The negative effects of this “transfer portal” mostly affect Class A schools as the talent becomes more saturated in certain schools.
The biggest problems this poses are that it bars students who have been playing for the same school from getting the spots they have spent their whole careers working to get to just because someone else decided they didn’t like their other school anymore.
Also, if a student knows that all these elite athletes are transferring into their school it could discourage them from even trying out for that sport. It could even lead to students from other schools not wanting to go out for sports because they don’t want to compete against these super teams.
Stricter regulations need to be put in place to keep schools from being able to create these collegiate level high school teams. It threatens the true nature of high school sports, which is to play with others from your own area and bring a true championship home to your school.
