Coronado High School players welcome their starters prior to the Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association’s girls volleyball championship in 2015. Beginning with the 2022-’23 school year, the NIAA is deeming student-athletes with two failing grades on their quarterly report card as ineligible for competition.
Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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The Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association is continuing to evolve its academic eligibility standards, with officials saying new regulations this school year are designed to hold participants more responsible and give them a pathway to return quickly to competition.
The latest change: Any student-athlete who receives more than one “F” on their report card will be ineligible for three weeks, even if their grade-point average remains above the longstanding 2.0 threshold.
Hypothetically, a student who receives an “A” in six of their eight classes, but scores a “F” in the other two would be ineligible. Students whose grade-point average falls below 2.0 would still be ineligible.
The standard begins in practice on Monday, when the roughly 20,000 student-athletes in the Clark County School District return to classes. The initial nine-week quarter of grades will be released early October, when teams competing in the fall sports season are gearing up for the playoffs.
Grades are annually issued nine weeks into each of the two semesters, and at the end of each semester. Athletes for the fall 2023 season — not the one about to begin — will be judged on the spring 2023 semester grades.
“We are holding student-athletes more accountable for being a student and giving a pathway to get back in three weeks,” said Donnie Nelson, the executive director of the association, which regulates prep sports statewide. “The bottom line is, we want you to participate.”
The mantra was at the heart of a decision last summer, when the association altered the penalty for being ineligible from nine weeks to three weeks. The change was instituted because some athletes participating in fall sports had a grade-point average less than 2.0 from the previous spring, when remote learning during the pandemic was problematic for students, including those who had internet connectivity struggles or whose family were victims of the health crisis.
Instead of making the athlete sit out nine weeks — essentially the entire season — they could rejoin the team after three weeks if the student was able to elevate the grade-point average higher than 2.0.
That change, Nelson said, was well received by member schools.
“If a kid is out for nine weeks the mentality could be, ‘Why would I even go out?’ ” Nelson said. “But with three weeks, you can still make the team and be back in no time. When COVID came, it made it real easy to (bring change).”
Rolling out the multiple “F” grade standard came with some hiccups.
The association sent notice of the change at the beginning of the summer, saying it would be used to determine eligibility for the fall season on the horizon. That would have meant students were unknowingly judged differently on their spring semester marks.
When news started to spread in the coaching community, it was met with strong disapproval, including one coach who said he rushed to campus to log onto the grading system to see which one of his football players would be ruled ineligible.
Rich Muraco, the Liberty High School athletic director and football coach, was part of a group that spoke out against the change during an association meeting. The group also included Pam Sloan and Tim Jackson, who are the directors of athletics and activities for CCSD.
The association took the feedback and changed the timeline.
“They saw what is best for students, which I really appreciated,” Nelson said. “They asked, ‘How do we do this now when we didn’t do it before?’ We all want to put kids in the position to succeed, and I appreciate (everyone) working together to find what’s best.”
Muraco, who is also the head of the Southern Nevada Football Coaches Association, maintains that as long as coaches and administrators know in advance, they are willing to work to give a student the tools to achieve in the classroom. They are constantly running grade checks during the season for all sports, and if a student is falling behind, they will work to address the issue with tutoring or having an athlete miss practice time to get assignments completed.
“The (timeline change) meant a lot to my fellow athletic directors and administrators,” Muraco said. “We are all about the kids. That’s why we are in the business, to be educators. We advocate for kids. How can we give them support to get eligible when the rule came out after (grades were released)? But they listened. That is what good leadership does. They needed to hear other voices.”
That’s why the 2021 change of allowing athletes to return to competition after three weeks instead of nine after being declared ineligible is staying on the books; it was well-received by school officials and athletes alike.
“I think that on one hand what the NIAA has done with allowing kids to be eligible after three weeks is a great thing for kids,” Muraco said. “They countered a little bit and made a little more accountability on the kids’ side with the ‘F’ rule. As long as we know in advance, I get why they did it.”
