With the looming possibility for significant changes to rules regarding the way boarding schools are allowed to operate within the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association, McCallie School administrators have submitted a proposal for the TSSAA Legislative Council to consider.
At its most recent meeting in April, the Legislative Council — which is responsible for setting the rules the TSSAA’s 426 member schools must abide by — tabled a vote on a proposal that would have severely limited the ability of boarding schools to function as they currently do.
That discussion involved a change in the “residence rule” that would declare all students (domestic and international) who change schools after ninth grade to be ruled ineligible to participate in athletics for one calendar year. It directly targeted the international students — specifically Canadian athletes — who have been a part of helping McCallie and Baylor in their dominance of Division II-AAA football over the past half-decade. McCallie is DII-AAA’s reigning champion after the Blue Tornado beat Baylor in last year’s BlueCross Bowl and has won four of the past five titles in the classification, with the Red Raiders winning the other title in that stretch.
Had that ruling passed, it almost certainly would have led to a fracture between the TSSAA and its five boarding schools — Baylor, McCallie, St. Andrew’s-Sewanee, The King’s Academy in Knoxville and Webb School of Bell Buckle — due to the negative effect it would have on the business model those schools have operated under since they opened.
By putting off a vote last spring, the hope was that a compromise could be reached before the Legislative Council’s next scheduled meeting on Dec. 12. The deadline for any new proposals to be submitted was Oct. 15 to allow for discussion among all member schools before that meeting, where council members will likely vote to determine whether to tweak or completely rewrite the rule as it currently stands.