Relaxed Florida transfer rules lead to growing free agency in high school sports

Like other Orlando area football fathers, Tony Jurgensen considered advice offered from specialized trainers and high school assistant coaches on which programs might be the best fit for his son.

Those discussions began nearly five years ago after Jurgensen’s family, including then 10-year-old aspiring quarterback Bjorn, moved from Virginia to east Orange County.

“We’ve been hearing it since we moved here,” Tony Jurgensen said. “There’s a whisper campaign about where your kid would be the best fit and the schools not to send them to because a lot of these trainers and 7-on-7 coaches know the depth charts and who is graduating.”

In a state where school choice policies are designed to provide a multitude of academic options, Florida has come to be known as a free-for-all for athletes, with many of its best players opting to transfer from one school to another in hopes of winning big and bettering their college scholarship chances.

Conversations about where to go are not exclusive to high school football circles, where the emergence of position camps and offseason 7-on-7 tournaments help forge relationships between kids and coaches connected to other schools.

It’s been like that for years at youth volleyball, AAU basketball, travel baseball and softball and club soccer events, where many high school coaches (and other influencers) can be found coaching offseason teams as young players (and parents) talk about choosing their schools.

“You just try to put your kid in the best position to succeed academically and athletically,” Jurgensen said. “As a parent, if it’s his dream to play football at the college level, you want to see him be coached up and developed in high school.”

Coaching stability (and reputations), potential for playing time and academic performance are just some of the variables considered by parents and kids when it comes to finding the best fit.

Musical chairs

Zoned for Timber Creek, the Jurgensens opted to enroll their son at Dr. Phillips, where he played sparingly at quarterback the past two seasons. Bjorn transferred to Bishop Moore in early January for what his father said was partially an academic-based move. He will be eligible to participate in spring practices with the Hornets in May.

Shifting from one school to another between the first and second semesters is now common practice for football players in Florida. The pilgrimage for high school athletes picks up steam again in early June.

According to Larry Blustein, an authority on high school football in the state since 1970, there’s already been 59 mid-year football transfers in Miami-Dade and Broward counties as of Jan. 23.

Those two counties accounted for 447 football transfers in 2022 and 460 transfers in 2021, Blustein noted.

It’s a trend that, similar to transfers for non-football sports, proves parents and players remain vigilant in finding what they perceive to be better situations.

“It’s become part of the deal now,” Blustein said. “If a kid wants to go to a school and it has an open desk, there’s no stopping it.”

Brant Parsons, a former Sentinel sports reporter and now founder and publisher of the state-wide Kabra Wrestling website, documented nearly 100 transfers for that sport, which includes move-ins from out of state.

“Most transfers are kids just trying to get a shot at being part of a better program, facing tougher competition and getting a chance to wrestle in college,” Parsons said.

Florida’s open enrollment law, which began with the 2017-18 school year, allows for parents to enroll their kids in public or charter schools located outside of their home-zoned areas as long as those schools are deemed to be under capacity.

“The controlled open enrollment plan is in addition to the existing [school] choice programs such as magnet schools, alternative schools, special programs, advanced placement, and dual enrollment,” per the Florida Department of Education website.

The transfer process varies for each of the state’s 67 public school districts, including Orange, Seminole, Osceola, Lake and Volusia counties.

Different guidelines exist for faith-based and college-prep private schools, where kids can play varsity sports as middle-schoolers in sixth, seventh and eighth grades. With the use of homeschool or online programs such as Florida Virtual Flex, students are able to enroll at some of those schools and pay only a small fee for athletics without attending classes on campus.

Florida High School Athletic Association rules on transfers, which once required proof of a residency change, were softened by state legislative action to the point where some area players have played football at one school and then transferred to another to play basketball or baseball.

It’s feasible for a student to play sports in the fall, winter and spring seasons at three different schools in the same year as long as principals at those schools sign off on the move.

Roadblocks do still exist, though.

Parents take charge

A.G. Waseem, who has close ties to college recruiters and has been involved in the 7-on-7 circuit, experienced that firsthand while moving his son between schools the past two years.

“You’ve got to jump through hoops to change schools in Orange County,” said Waseem, who began taking area football prospects on bus tours of college campuses in 2010. “They make it difficult, but there’s always a way around it just like anything else.”

Waseem legally separated from his wife and rented a home in Winter Garden two years ago so that Asaad Waseem, a wide receiver, could transfer to West Orange from Wekiva, which had fired its head coach.

Asaad, one of several transfers who arrived at West Orange in 2021, helped the team reach the regional championship game that season. West Orange’s coach left for a higher-paying coaching job in Georgia three months later. Before that, Asaad opted to play his senior season at Ocoee, his third school in three years.

Competing in athletics at three, four and even five schools during a varsity career is no longer an abnormality, and not solely confined to football.

“Whether it’s academics or athletics, a parent should be able to put their kid in the best situation for them,” A.G. said. “My son is the poster child for that.”

Ocoee, with a handful of other transfers on roster, reached the state semifinals for the first time last fall and Asaad was named Orlando Sentinel Varsity offensive player of the year.

He signed a National Letter of Intent with the University of Colorado last month following a rocky recruiting cycle that A.G. says was the result of disgruntled former coaches.

“That’s one of the reasons why kids should be able to go wherever they want,” A.G. said. “No coach should reach out to kids and actively recruit them to play at their school, but if a parent wants to reach out about bringing their kid to a different program, they should have that right.”

Recruiting has become so commonplace in high school football circles that UCF commit Sincere Edwards, a rising senior star defensive lineman at Wekiva who previously excelled as an eighth- and ninth-grader at Orangewood Christian, made a plea about it on Twitter.

“This is for all the local HS coaches in my area,” Edwards wrote in a Dec. 3 post. “I am a Wekiva Mustang. [Please] stop trying to get your players to recruit me.”

Recruiting violations? Prove it

Outright recruiting of athletes is banned by the FHSAA as outlined in Policy 36, which reads “any effort by a school employee, athletic department staff member or representative of a school’s athletic interests to pressure, urge or entice a student to attend that school for the purpose of participating in interscholastic athletics.”

Despite the hard-line language in the rule, the rise of schools promoting their programs on social media and assistant coaches being seen on the front lines at offseason outings make it hard to believe that improprieties are not taking place.

“Recruiting is very difficult to prove,” FHSAA executive director Craig Damon said in a phone interview with the Sentinel. “Hearsay stuff you can’t prove. We have had some success [in recruiting cases]. A lot of time it basically comes down to information provided by kids who were recruited. Sometimes it comes from families of students who were replaced [by a transfer athlete]. We have to have tangible evidence, like screenshots, text messages. Sometimes it’s social media direct messages.”

That unscrupulous element in high school sports bothers many — even ardent supporters of transferring for athletic reasons.

“Parents are taking advantage of school choice, which was a strong movement in the state of Florida, and we understand that,” Damon acknowledged. “We got the hand we were dealt and we have adjusted. We don’t mind parents making those decisions; we just don’t want [other] adults influencing parents. We can’t stress enough that parents should always put the academic side first.”

When Dave Parks alerted Lake Mary’s football coach that his son, David Parks, decided to transfer to nearby rival Sanford Seminole over the summer, he said, “It went as smoothly as you could have asked for.

“We let them know ahead of time and were told that if it doesn’t work out that he can always come back [to Lake Mary],” Dave said. “It was all about him wanting to play with guys he’s known or played tackle football with before.”

David, a rising junior quarterback who also kicks and punts, was a freshman at Lake Mary behind four-year starter Gunnar Smith. He stepped in for injured Seminole quarterback Luke Rucker as a sophomore and made five starts last fall after also playing at tight end.

A car enthusiast, David hopes to be accepted into the auto shop classes offered at Seminole in what has turned out to be another benefit to transferring, according to his father.

“As a parent, you’re always trying to do the best by your kid, no matter what it is,” Dave said. “No one’s got it perfect. We’re all trying to figure it out as we go. There’s no manual for it, so you’re just doing the best you can and you hope you’re doing it right.”

This article originally appeared on OrlandoSentinel.com. Email J.C. Carnahan at jcarnahan@orlandosentinel.com.