We write as members of the North Salem basketball community: coaches, players, and families who believe deeply in the very thing the O.R.C.A. proposal claims to protect, namely strong high school programs rooted in real communities. It is because we believe in community that we oppose this proposal. O.R.C.A. would not reclaim community. It would punish the children who have the least control over where they live, and it would do so in a way that falls hardest on families with low incomes, on students of color, and on kids whose families are one rent increase away from moving again. We respectfully urge the OSAA to reject it.
We should say plainly that we have no competitive stake in this. North Salem basketball has not reached the state playoffs in some time; the championship bracket O.R.C.A. would gatekeep is not a place we are currently fighting to be, and no transfer threshold would change our season one way or the other. If self interest were our guide, we would have no reason to write at all. We write anyway, because the schools this proposal would punish look like ours: schools of high poverty and high mobility, serving the kids who move because life moved them. We see our own families in the families O.R.C.A. would penalize, and we do not believe a rule becomes fair simply because its harm falls on schools like North Salem rather than on the programs with the loudest voices. That is precisely why it should be said by a program with nothing to gain in saying it.
Let us be clear about what we are not saying. We do not doubt that the concern behind O.R.C.A. is real. A small number of programs can, and sometimes do, assemble transfer heavy rosters in ways that strain competitive balance and frustrate schools that build from within. That worry is legitimate, and we share it. But a legitimate concern does not justify a harmful remedy. The test of any rule is not whether the problem is real; it is whether the rule solves that problem without doing greater harm elsewhere. O.R.C.A. fails that test. It sweeps up the evicted, the displaced, and the involuntarily moved in the very same net as the recruited. As we explain below, it lands hardest on the students and schools least able to absorb it.
The proposal’s premise sounds reasonable: reward “school based development” and discourage “roster building via transfers.” But the mechanism it chooses, counting how many kids on a team once changed schools and banishing teams that cross a threshold to a separate, lesser “Willamette Cup,” does not measure recruiting. It measures moving. And in Oregon today, the families who move the most are not the ones chasing a state title. They are the ones chasing stable housing.
It punishes children for their families’ circumstances
Consider who a “transfer” actually is under this proposal. By its own definitions, a transfer is any student who changed high schools after the start of 9th grade and plays a single varsity minute, regardless of why they moved, regardless of whether they have been in the program for three years, and, as the FAQ makes explicit, with no exceptions and no appeals, even for “out of state, interdistrict, foreign exchange, or sibling moves.” A student whose family was evicted counts exactly the same as a student who was recruited. A student placed in foster care counts. A student who fled an unsafe home counts. A student whose parent took a job in the next town counts. None of them did anything wrong, and any one of them can trigger their entire team’s relegation.
This is not a hypothetical population. During the 2023 to 2024 school year, the Oregon Department of Education identified more than 22,000 students, roughly four percent of the state’s K through 12 enrollment, as experiencing homelessness, the highest total in more than a decade. Not every one of those students changes schools; federal law works hard to keep many of them in place. But many do move, sometimes more than once, when staying is not possible, and when they do, O.R.C.A. counts them. The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act guarantees students experiencing homelessness a “full and equal opportunity to succeed in school,” including access to extracurricular activities, and requires schools to remove, not create, barriers to that participation. A rule that forces a coach to weigh a displaced student’s roster spot against the team’s championship eligibility is exactly such a barrier.
The same defect reaches families whose moves we normally honor. Oregon is a member of the Interstate Compact on Educational Opportunity for Military Children (ORS 326.552), under which the state commits to facilitating athletic and extracurricular eligibility for the children of service members who relocate on orders. O.R.C.A. would count that child as a “transfer” against their new team, turning a military family’s sacrifice into a competitive liability, in direct tension with a compact Oregon has already adopted.
Children in foster care are hit hardest of all. In 2023 to 2024, sixty percent of Oregon’s foster care students were classified as mobile (changing schools, enrolling late, or attending more than one school in a single year), compared with just twelve percent of students overall, a fivefold gap. These are moves no child chooses, and federal law again intervenes: the Every Student Succeeds Act requires schools to keep foster youth in their school of origin and to protect their educational stability. O.R.C.A. would take the most disrupted and least empowered students in our system and count their disruption against their team.
The burden falls along lines of income and race, and Oregon law recognizes exactly that
O.R.C.A.’s defenders will say the rule applies equally to everyone. On paper, it does. In practice, a rule that penalizes changing schools falls hardest where changing schools is most common, and housing instability, along with the mobility that comes with it, tracks income and race. Families with low incomes move more often. And students of color are consistently overrepresented among students who experience homelessness: nationally, Hispanic students make up 39 percent of students experiencing homelessness against 29 percent of all students, and Black students 25 percent against 15 percent. Oregon’s own housing instability and eviction data mirror the pattern. A rule that is neutral on its face but predictably concentrates its harm on those students is not neutral in effect.
There is a bitter irony here. The schools that can most easily field a roster with few transfers are the schools whose families can most easily afford to stay put: stable housing, a job that does not relocate, a mortgage instead of a month to month lease. O.R.C.A. rewards precisely that stability and penalizes its absence. Far from leveling the field, it hands a lasting advantage to the already advantaged, and brands the schools serving displaced students and students from lower income homes as somehow less “community.” A policy sold as protecting competitive integrity would, in operation, protect privilege.
Oregon law speaks directly to this situation. ORS 659.850 prohibits discrimination in “any public elementary, secondary or community college education program or service, school or interschool activity” (language that reaches OSAA competition itself), and it defines discrimination to include not only intentional acts but “any act that is fair in form but discriminatory in operation.” That is a precise description of O.R.C.A.: a facially neutral transfer count whose operation would sort the teams of the poorest and most mobile students into a separate, lesser tournament. This is not a distant federal theory. It is a binding Oregon standard that the OSAA and its member schools are already obligated to meet, enforced through the State Board of Education and the Oregon Department of Education.
We raise this not to predict a lawsuit, but to make a straightforward point: before the OSAA adopts a policy that foreseeably burdens students by race and income, it should be able to show that it has measured that burden. To our knowledge, no equity impact analysis of O.R.C.A. has been conducted or published. The OSAA does not currently know how many teams the thresholds would catch, which schools those teams represent, or what their students look like. A policy that cannot yet answer those questions should not be run as a live experiment on real children. (We note that this concern is sometimes labeled “Title IX,” which addresses sex discrimination; the sharper problems here concern race, income, and homelessness, and are best addressed under Oregon’s ORS 659.850 and the McKinney-Vento Act.)
This lands squarely on Title I schools, schools like ours
It is worth naming, plainly, which schools O.R.C.A. would relegate. A Title I school is one the federal government identifies as serving a high concentration of students from families with low incomes. The schoolwide designation begins at forty percent. These are, by definition, the schools whose families have the least economic stability, and therefore the schools whose students move the most. That correlation is not incidental; it is the entire premise of the Title I designation. In operation, O.R.C.A.’s “noncommunity” flag would track the Title I map almost exactly: the schools the federal government singles out for support because their students face hardship are the very schools O.R.C.A. would single out for demotion because of it.
We do not raise this in the abstract. North Salem is one of those schools. Roughly nine in ten of our students (about 89 percent) qualify for free or reduced price meals, and nearly two thirds are Hispanic. Our families move because rents rise, leases end, and work changes, not because anyone is chasing a trophy. Under O.R.C.A., the ordinary churn of a working class, majority Latino student body (the churn that federal Title I dollars exist precisely to cushion) becomes the very thing that could bar our kids from a state championship and fix a symbol beside our name. A program that receives federal support because its students face economic hardship would be penalized by O.R.C.A. for the mobility that hardship causes. That is not reclaiming community. It is penalizing poverty, and calling it integrity.
It contradicts the OSAA’s own equity commitments
The OSAA has publicly committed that “equity and civil rights violations will not be tolerated in any form,” with particular concern for “communities of color, tribal communities,” and other historically underrepresented students. It created an Equity & Diversity Advisory Committee expressly to apply “an equity lens in all aspects of the Association’s work.” O.R.C.A. cannot survive that lens. A proposal whose foreseeable effect is to push the teams of the poorest and most mobile students out of the state championship, and to brand them publicly with a “designation symbol” on the OSAA rankings and standings pages, a scarlet letter visible to every recruiter, opponent, and parent, is not equity. It is the opposite of it.
“Community” is not a 9th grade address
The proposal’s deepest flaw is conceptual: it defines “community” as the single building a student happened to be enrolled in on the first day of 9th grade, and then treats every later move as a departure from community. That is a thin, almost cartoonish picture of what a school community actually is. Coaches commute in from all over the region; many do not live in the attendance zone of the school they serve, and no one questions their membership in that community. Alumni move away for college, work, and family, yet remain proud, active members of their high school community for the rest of their lives: they come back for games, they mentor players, they give. Teachers, families with open enrollment or magnet placements, siblings at different schools, military and working families who relocate: a real community is a web of people and relationships, not a permanent stamp fixed to where a student lived at fourteen.
Nowhere is that clearer than in who O.R.C.A. chooses to measure, and who it pointedly ignores. Consider the coaching staff. Head coaches, assistants, and volunteers routinely come from well outside a school’s attendance zone; many were hired precisely for their expertise rather than their address, and a good number have no “community” tie to the school at all under O.R.C.A.’s own 9th grade test. Yet the proposal never once asks whether a coaching staff is “community based.” It counts only the students. If school based community were truly the principle at stake, the very same logic would have to apply to the adults who recruit, build, and run these programs. And it plainly cannot, because no one seriously believes a coach who lives one town over is an interloper. That the standard is aimed exclusively at teenagers and their families, and never at the adults who hold all the power in the building, is telling. It reveals what O.R.C.A. actually measures: not community, but the mobility of the people least able to control it.
By O.R.C.A.’s logic, a student who has bled for a program for three seasons, whose family and coaches and teammates are that community, is forever an outsider because of an address they had at fourteen, while “community” standing would be denied to the very people whose belonging is obvious to everyone. A definition of community that excludes the kid in the huddle and would exclude half the coaches in the gym is not measuring community at all. It is measuring paperwork, and calling it belonging.
It punishes the blameless and rewards the wrong behavior
Even setting the law aside, O.R.C.A. fails on its own terms. The OSAA already prohibits recruiting and already regulates athletic transfers, residence changes, and eligibility. This proposal, by its own admission, does not target recruiting conduct at all. The FAQ concedes that “a team may be completely compliant with all OSAA transfer bylaws but still exceed the community based threshold.” In plain terms: it punishes schools that broke no rule. It measures the composition of a roster, not the intent behind it, and then treats a family’s involuntary move as morally equivalent to a coach poaching a star. A rule that cannot tell the difference between an evicted family and a recruiting violation is not protecting anyone’s integrity.
Worse, it creates incentives that run directly against “community.” Because only players who appear in a varsity game count toward the threshold, the coldly rational move for a program focused on winning is to keep transfer students off the varsity floor entirely. Most disturbingly, it invites coaches to cut borderline players and players at the end of the bench who happen to be transfers, in order to get the roster back under the cap. Think about what that means: a rule sold as protecting kids would push coaches to cut the exact kids who most need a team, the role players, the late arrivals, the ones for whom making the roster is the whole point. A displaced student would not just be barred from a title; they could lose their spot altogether so the team can keep its eligibility. O.R.C.A. would turn our most vulnerable students into a liability on a stat sheet. There is nothing “community” about that.
Nor should anyone be reassured by the proposal’s claim that its thresholds (two current, three total) already “accommodate a reasonable amount of standard, legal student movement.” For a stable, affluent school, perhaps they do. For a high mobility school they are nothing of the kind: a single varsity roster at a place like North Salem can easily carry more than three students who changed schools, not one of whom moved for basketball. Worth stressing, too, is that O.R.C.A. counts these students even when their move is a bona fide change of residence that OSAA’s existing rules already accept as fully eligible. The family did everything right, met every current requirement, and still counts against the team. And the reassurance collapses on its own terms, because it takes only one student over the line to relegate the entire team and to trigger the incentive to cut that student. A threshold that sounds lenient in a boardroom is a trap for exactly the schools with the most displaced kids. Tellingly, the OSAA has offered no data showing these numbers were calibrated to how often Oregon students actually move; they appear to have been chosen by intuition and imposed as though they were science.
It adds a rule the OSAA cannot enforce to a system already straining to enforce the rules it has
O.R.C.A. rests entirely on the honor system. The proposal requires each school to “track their own varsity rosters” and to report itself the moment it crosses a threshold, with the OSAA verifying only after the fact. But if the underlying concern is that a small number of programs are already bending the recruiting and residency rules, why would those same programs be trusted to voluntarily turn themselves in? A rule that relies on schools reporting themselves punishes the honest and rewards the willing: the schools playing by the rules will dutifully flag themselves out of the championship, while any program inclined to game the system simply does not report, benching a player here or delaying a varsity appearance there. The OSAA already has difficulty enforcing its existing, clearly defined transfer and recruiting bylaws; layering a new, easily manipulated threshold on top does not close that enforcement gap. It just gives well intentioned schools a new way to be penalized for their honesty.
The separate bracket is the punishment, and “it’s only a pilot” is no answer
The proposal frames the Willamette Cup as a mere alternative rather than a penalty. Students and coaches will not experience it that way. A separate, lower status tournament, played before the “real” state finals, for teams flagged with a public symbol, is a demotion. Everyone involved will understand it as one. Teams cannot opt in or out; a single varsity appearance by a single transfer “permanently locks” the count for the entire season, with no way to earn eligibility back, even if that student is injured, quits, or withdraws. The rigidity is presented as a feature. It is the core defect.
Nor is “it is only a two year pilot” a reassurance. The interim review in Spring 2027 and the assessment in Spring 2028 arrive too late for the students living through the experiment in between. A senior whose team is relegated this winter does not get her senior postseason back. A player cut in November to bring a roster under the cap does not get that season back if the pilot is later judged a failure. When the subjects of an experiment are children, and the stakes are their seasons and their standing, “let’s see how it goes” is not a safeguard. It is the harm.
Oregon would be moving against the current
It is worth noting where the rest of the country is heading. The clear national trend among state athletic associations is toward greater flexibility for student athletes who change schools, not less; a growing number of states now permit a transfer with immediate eligibility. National civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, have specifically urged athletic associations to reform transfer eligibility rules with equity and fairness in mind, precisely because rigid transfer restrictions fall disproportionately on students of color and families with low incomes. O.R.C.A.’s particular device, a team level transfer cap that routes disfavored teams into a separate, publicly labeled tournament, appears to be novel and untested. Oregon should be wary of experimenting, on its most vulnerable students, with a mechanism no other state has been willing to adopt.
There are real threats to youth sports, and O.R.C.A. is not one of them
We would be remiss not to say the obvious: the energy being poured into O.R.C.A. is energy not spent on the forces actually reshaping young athletes’ lives in this state. O.R.C.A. chases a narrow competitive grievance affecting a handful of programs. Meanwhile, far larger currents are pulling at youth sports, and counting transfers addresses not one of them.
Consider the money. Youth sports in the United States is now a roughly $43 billion industry, and private capital has noticed: private equity firms are buying up academies, tournament operators, and training platforms. IMG Academy sold for about $1.25 billion in 2023, and Varsity Brands for roughly $4.75 billion in 2024, even as the cost of playing has climbed about 46 percent in five years, to more than $1,000 per child per sport. The predictable result is a widening chasm between the families who can pay and the families who cannot. Children from households earning under $25,000 play sports at little more than half the rate of children from households earning over $100,000: 24 percent against 40 percent. The real threat to “community based” athletics is not a transfer student. It is an economic sorting machine quietly pricing lower income kids, the very kids at schools like ours, out of the game before high school ever begins.
Consider the toll on kids. The American Academy of Pediatrics warns that the professionalization of youth sports, with its early single sport specialization, year round training, and relentless pressure, is fueling a rise in overuse injuries, burnout, anxiety, and depression, and it urges more rest, more free play, and more participation in multiple sports, not less. The average American child now quits sports by age 11, walking away after less than three years. A rule that pressures programs to bench and cut kids to protect a bracket pushes in precisely the wrong direction. If we care about young athletes, the work is to keep more of them in the game, healthier and longer, not to invent new ways to sort them out of it.
Consider what high school sports are actually for. The numbers are humbling. Only about 3.6 percent of high school boys and 4.5 percent of high school girls who play basketball will ever make a college roster of any division, and roughly one percent of those will be drafted professionally. For virtually every child we coach, high school is the summit of their competitive career. The point of it was never the banner on the wall. It was the discipline, the belonging, the resilience, the friendships, and the lessons they carry into the rest of their lives. A proposal that treats a state title as a sacred prize to be defended, even at the cost of a displaced child’s roster spot, has the purpose of high school athletics exactly backwards. We are here to build young people. The trophies are a byproduct.
And there is no shortage of work worthy of the adults in this system. The officiating shortage, driven in no small part by the abuse referees endure, now threatens whether games get played at all. Athlete safety and abuse prevention; mental health support and access to athletic trainers, especially at schools with the fewest resources; the harassment of teenagers by sports gamblers; food insecurity among the very athletes we feed at practice; and simply getting more kids in our communities playing anything at all: these are the challenges that will decide whether Oregon’s young people are better off for having played. O.R.C.A. addresses none of them. It spends scarce attention, and scarcer goodwill, relitigating where a teenager happened to attend the ninth grade.
A better path forward
We share the goal of strong, community rooted programs. There are ways to pursue this that do not require sacrificing our most vulnerable kids:
- Target conduct, not composition. If recruiting is the concern, invest in enforcing the recruiting and undue influence rules the OSAA already has, so the few programs actually bending them face consequences, rather than penalizing every team by a headcount.
- Exempt involuntary and legally protected moves. Any workable policy must exclude students eligible under McKinney-Vento, documented family hardship, foster care placements, military relocations, assignments outside the district, and other moves beyond a student’s control. These are the very exceptions O.R.C.A. proudly refuses to make.
- If competitive balance is the goal, use a competitive balance tool. Approaches used elsewhere, such as brief sit out periods that apply only to transfers motivated by athletics, or classification adjustments based on enrollment and competitive success, address imbalance without branding kids or their schools.
- Do the equity analysis first. Publish a study of the likely impact, showing which teams and which students the thresholds would actually affect, before any pilot touches a single season.
- Keep every Oregon kid on one path. A single state championship, open to all, is itself a statement of community.
We respectfully ask the OSAA to reject the O.R.C.A. pilot in 5A and 6A basketball, and to decline to expand it to any classification or sport. If the Association truly wants to reclaim community in athletics, the place to start is by making sure the child whose family just lost their apartment still has a team, a season, and a fair shot at a state title, the same as every other kid in Oregon.
We raise our voices not for our own bracket (we have no illusions about where North Salem sits in the standings) but for the students across this state who look like ours and deserve better than to be quietly sorted out of the game. We hope the OSAA will stand with them, too.
Respectfully submitted,