Transfers have completely ruined the game.

It ain’t going away

NCFB73 said:

Watching page after page making transfers sound like a good thing is awful. These kids can’t win with hard work so they just go directly to join a “super team.”

The state champion isn’t even a true champion anymore, it is the team with the best recruiting and us 20 something’s glorify it.

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100% agree. They want instant gratification and to be on a instant winning team. They are not willing to put in the work to make an average or bad program into a winning one. And I don't want to hear about the college recruiting mess. It is 2026 and social media is everywhere in our lives. If you are a great player on a bad team, you will still get noticed by, watched by and recruited by dozens of college programs. So that is just a cop out.

fitguync30 said:

100% agree. They want instant gratification and to be on a instant winning team. They are not willing to put in the work to make an average or bad program into a winning one. And I don't want to hear about the college recruiting mess. It is 2026 and social media is everywhere in our lives. If you are a great player on a bad team, you will still get noticed by, watched by and recruited by dozens of college programs. So that is just a cop out.

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I have to disagree some. An individual player or few players are not going to make a team into a winning one..It takes a collective of everyone from players, coaches, parents, school (staff&facilities). CLEVELAND COUNTY is small but the four school have all the ingredients to be successful programs and send multiple players to D1 and also the over shadowed d2 and d3 which contributes to more years of free or very discounted education.
The whole they will find you just isn't true for 'everyone'. I have numerous college coaches I talk with in another sport and I can tell you that colleges want you playing at the better programs competing against teammates on the same level and going against the same higher level competition.

I just think that a lot of times the transfers just don’t work out. They don’t win the state title or they don’t get the scholarship they were promised. I’m sure that does happen for some. I don’t think it’s ruined the game. And I understand why some kids and their parents believe a transfer is the best thing for them. But overall, the promises tend to fall short and the juice ain’t worth the squeeze

I will ask the question are we talking about transfers or kids getting recruited by coaching staffs to transfer? In my opinion these are two totally different things. I think each individual situation cannot be just lumped into he left because he was promised this or that. I think there are situations where kids leave to go play for a certain coaches and schools because they will have the following:
-Better coaches that give more of their time to winning and the overall development of the kid
-Better school in general (better facilities, safer school, better academics)
-Better teammates to practice against everyday and yes have a better chance to win and care more about winning, and if you want to play after high school, more looks for college.

Just a few examples of situations I have seen where kids/parents decide to leave a school and go to another one without any recruitment whatsoever from other coaches or adults.

Also I don’t count kids trying to get other kids to come to their school as recruiting. That has been going on since the dawn of time.

Isaiah Helms played on a winless team and played 2 years at western then went to App. So they can find diamonds in the rough, but it is easier to get recruited at high achieving schools.

We have no one to blame but ourselves

NCFB73 said:

I agree. If we would stop making this look admirable it would go away. Coaches constantly trying to interview for the next job don’t help either.

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Social media just spotlight something thats been going on for years....There is no stopping this in any form because exposure is a big part of the recruiting process. You cant fault families for making moves if it gives their kid a better chance at playing beyond 12th grade. There are actually some high schools that still dont even have recruiting coordinators and that puts their kids even further behind other programs.

Coaches should apply and try to advance their careers. I just hate when they apply and then names leak out and they dont get position.

If there is a coach talking crap about his own kids on social media, I do not blame them for leaving, no matter how much I dislike the current transfer situation. Also, the HC cannot be blind to this. Why hasnt he done anything?

Ill disagree on this one. If you don't want transfers you better put a product out on the field worth playing for. If your school/school system doesn't care about the athletic side of high school sports, then they are creating the transfers not the kids. Good ol free market capitalism. You cant force kids to stay in bad situations successfully. Show me a school with multiple transfers out, and I'll bet you have a school with an internal issue. Sure you will have an occasional guy leave for an odd reason, but who cares. Focus on making your product worth more and retain players, and you may even get a few families whose values and culture align with your program transfer in.

Nobody cares when a kid transfers to a school on an academic track, but some lose their mind when a kid wants to better his situation through sports? I am not even speaking about recruiting lies, but I am talking about hundreds of athletes getting robbed of a high school athletic experience because Mamma and Poppa bought in a school zone with incompetent leadership. I unfortunately speak from experience, and luckily our program has made a pivot in the right direction, under new leadership putting in the work to be successful. We can all name local schools, that if we are honest ,we know are not as fortunate.