Key issues before WIAA this week

Q: I'm hearing that the 3A boys and girls basketball tournaments are headed back to Tacoma next year because of low attendance in Seattle. True?

A: Not yet. A decision could come Thursday when the executive board of the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association meets.

WIAA Executive Director Mike Colbrese also said a decision could be delayed until July.

The 3A tournaments moved from the Tacoma Dome to Seattle in 2007. They had not been in Seattle since 2000, when boys and girls games were played side by side in the Kingdome and the tournaments drew 42,540.

This year's tournaments drew less than half that figure and there was the added expense of two sites — KeyArena for 2 ½ days and Edmundson Pavilion for four. That's because neither facility has side-by-side courts.

"Our crowds haven't come back like we thought they would," Colbrese said.

The WIAA wants tournaments to succeed in Seattle because the potential fan base is huge and there are more 3A than 4A schools in the city. But the WIAA relies on basketball-tournament and football-playoff revenue to fund operations, so this will be a business decision, not a "Gosh, Seattle deserves something" matter.

Q: What are the key items before the WIAA Representative Assembly Friday?

A: One proposal could drastically reduce the number of transfers among high schools in the same school district. It would do so by putting any transfer case that didn't meet automatic criteria (such as a bona fide change in residence or guardian) under WIAA jurisdiction.

Presently, the WIAA handles transfers involving students switching from one school district to another who don't meet the automatic criteria. The switch of a Garfield basketball star to Rainier Beach last summer didn't come under WIAA scrutiny.

A student whose transfer isn't automatic or approved is ineligible for varsity competition for a year.

The proposal would slow the stream of Seattle athletes jumping from one school to another in the district's open-enrollment policy. It also could halt a situation such as last fall in Spokane when a backup quarterback switched schools late in the season.

The Rep Assembly, a different body than the executive board, also will decide whether to sanction girls lacrosse as a WIAA sport.

Two other proposals could be called "Archbishop Murphy Rules." One would suspend a student who played with an expired physical but NOT the team for the number of games the athlete played. The other proposal would allow leagues the leeway not to penalize a team that used an ineligible participant because of an inadvertent error.

Under the proposal, the school asking for mercy must show that the error wasn't intentional and that procedures were in effect to avoid it.

Murphy was bounced from the 2A football playoffs last fall because a player's physical had lapsed. The mistake wasn't caught because Terry Ennis, who was coach and athletic director, was terminally ill when the physical lapsed and died days later.

The WIAA was ridiculed in a Sports Illustrated column by Rick Reilly after Archbishop Murphy was disqualified.

Reilly wrote: "The smallest-brained crustaceans are water fleas. The smallest-brained parasites are flatworms. And the smallest-brained mammals are the men and women who run high-school athletics in the state of Washington."

Both amendments to prevent another Murphy debacle are sponsored by the WIAA executive board, which shows it has moved thousands of years up Reilly's evolutionary scale.

Craig Smith: 206-464-8279 or csmith@seattletimes.com