On Monday, the Register published an article from the Associated Press detailing complaints filed with the NAACP over a rule the Kansas Jayhawk Community College Conference that limits the number of athletes the conference’s football and basketball programs can recruit from out-of-state.
The conference requires its football teams to stay at under 20 scholarship out-of-state players while men’s and women’s basketball can carry up to eight out-of-state players.
Among those filing a complaint was Garden City Community College football coach Jeffery Sims who told the Associated Press that: “Out-of-stater is a code word for minority.”
Allen Community College President John Masterson says that he never anticipated anyone reacting that way to the rule.
“The action that Garden City took, took me by surprise because I’ve been associated with the conference and its athletics for since 1973 and I have never heard anyone respond to the out-of-state limitations as any kind of racial quota,” Masterson said.
He says that the original purpose of the rule had much more to do with dollars and cents. The limit was made with competitive balance in mind.
“Many, many years ago, out-of-state tuition had to be three-times the amount of your in state tuition,” Masterson explained. “In order for our conference to be competitive, top-to-bottom, with the 19 community colleges that were in the conference and for Allen to be competitive with Johnson County or Hutchinson or colleges substantially more assets than we did, they put limitations on the number of students that they could go outside of the state to bring in.”
Masterson says the rule has evolved over the years to adjust the leveling out of finances across the conference institutions.
“When I first started, the allowance was five basketball, so there were five basketball players that you were paying three-times as much for a scholarship as you were your Kansas kids,” Masterson said. “That was doable for Allen County Community College at the time, the same way it was for Johnson County. It was a parity, competitive-balance thing within the conference. The genesis of the thing was substantially different than what Garden City is pointing to.”
Masterson points out that in his many years at Allen, he has never heard the rule associated with race.
“When they try to make it a racial thing, my thought is: ‘So there are no minority students that play sports in the state of Kansas?’ I’ve been dealing with it a long, long time and this is the first time I’ve ever seen anybody link the out-of-state description to racism,” Masterson said. “It offended me.”
Red Devil women’s basketball coach Todd Buchanan has been working under the limits of the out-of-state rule since he took the position at Allen before last season. He has coached at every level of college basketball except Division-III – where they don’t allow athletic scholarships – and says he doesn’t see an issue with the rule.
“Obviously at the Division-I level at Houston, East Carolina, Oral Roberts or anywhere else I’ve been there isn’t a restriction on where kids come from, but obviously everyone has their limitation. When I was at Houston Baptist and were NAIA, we had 11 scholarship, but I could divide them up anyway I wanted to, but it is different at the junior college level for good reasons.
“If you look at it and see what every junior college is called and it is just that simple, it is a ‘community’ college. I believe the rule being instated the way that it is, is a positive.”
Buchanan emphasizes that college’s most important responsibility is to lift up its surrounding area and provide opportunities for players in that area.
“The reasoning I see behind it is that we are trying to build up as much as we can within our own community,” Buchanan said. “Everybody wants to see a winner in whatever sport it is, but at the end of the day, I think there has to be opportunity and fair opportunity for kids within the state of Kansas and certainly kids with our Allen County community.”
