Yergler’s move from Kouts being contested by receiving school
I swore off writing about transfer cases and the Indiana High School Athletic Association a few years ago. It’s easy to beat up on Darth Vader all the time. At some point, it’s time to move on and let the lawyers have some fun. There are too many other good stories to chase.
Here is my position, though.
The IHSAA has it all wrong on trying to regulate the business of who goes where and when someone should be given full eligibility and only limited eligibility for a year because it was ruled that the player moved from one high school to another for athletic reasons. The IHSAA doesn’t have the resources to police Indiana in a fair way. Let it go or figure out a way to rewrite the current policy to hold the IHSAA accountable for all the wasted money and time spent defending these cases. Then maybe the IHSAA would be a little bit more prudent about pursuing these cases.
I’ve written on both sides of the issue from Evan Schmidt, a 7-footer from Chesterton who curiously moved to the Wheeler school district for his senior year but went to Valparaiso and hardly played at all on a team that featured Scott Martin and Rob Hummel, to the IHSAA’s foray into the Angel Garcia saga. The IHSAA tried like heck to prove there was something sinister and something wrong with Garcia’s move from a prep school in Illinois to Indiana but it was wrong. And the IHSAA was pummelled in a court of law at every turn for being wrong.
Again and again and again, smart lawyers like Mike Jasaitis of Crown Point have argued successfully either before a judge or a case review panel, which isn’t occupied by IHSAA commissioners or rubber stamp athletic directors, for full eligibility for student athletes who get stiffed by the arbitrary nature of the IHSAA policy.
I’m jumping off the bandwagon today for the latest knucklehead foray into our judicial system by the IHSAA because this case was just too good to pass up.
On Thursday, Nick Otis, a LaPorte attorney and son of Valparaiso High School basketball coach Joe Otis, will defend Winston Yergler, a sophomore basketball player at North Judson who transferred from Kouts, at a preliminary injunction hearing in LaPorte. He will ask a judge to reinstate Yergler, who was ruled to have limited eligibility (he has to sit out a year because it was decided he left for athletic purposes) by the IHSAA in an initial ruling and then in an appeal.
Yergler is a promising, but not great, point guard who played varsity last season. His dad, Greg Yergler, is in sales. He is also a certified IHSAA official who is well versed in the rules. He moved to North Judson to be more centrally located for his job, which requires travel throughout the state. He wanted his son to be able to continue his basketball career uninterrupted.
The Kouts athletic director signed off on the transfer.
North Judson, amazingly, didn’t.
Why, you ask, would the receiving team of a pretty good player — one who could help the team — want to doubt the student’s intention for leaving?
Well, because the principal, Kelly Shepard, has a son on the junior varsity team who plays point guard. It seems that Yergler is a threat to him and his playing time — at least that is what Otis believes.
“That just raises lots of red flags,” Otis said of Shepard, who had alerted the IHSAA to Yergler’s situation.
Shepard didn’t return a phone call for comment.
This, my friends, is small-town school politics at its worse. Doesn’t Shepard have something better to do, like run a school?
The IHSAA only flags cases if one of the parties protest on the transfer form. Otherwise, it just moves on. So when three players from West Side follow John Boyd to Michigan City, no one bats an eye if both schools sign off on the deal. This is what happened with Alajuwon Edwards, Reggie Clay and Taylor Lavery.
In Yergler’s case, assistant commissioner Bobby Cox was supposed to conduct an investigation.
He never did. Never called Yergler. Never bothered to call Kouts. Never looked into any of it even though IHSAA Commissioner Blake Ress and their attorney have called this an extraordinary situation because the receiving school is complaining. It never, ever happens that way.
The appeals process was pretty distasteful with some fairly pointed questions coming from the panel about Yergler’s financial situation.
“It wasn’t fair,” Otis said.
That’s why Otis wants his day his court with his client with an impartial, sensible judge, where he has a better than good chance of turning this into a slam dunk for Yergler.