"Staying back to get ahead: High school basketball players are repeating

Prep Athletics has always served as an area of the educational
experience that has been heavily subjected to ever-changing oversight
through policy.  The majority of athletic education policy is geared
towards protecting the student athlete.  Protections such as time limitations
for participation, age requirements, equipment requirements, and personnel training
requirements all work in concert to safeguard health while positioning student athletes for
collegiate opportunities should their talent level result in recruitment.
1972's "Title Nine" amendment to the 1965 "Higher Education Act" serves
as an example of federal education policy that provided opportunity for athletes
who possessed the talent and academic requirements to pursue education
beyond Secondary school. This was done by legislatively erasing gender lines and promoting equality for all student athletes
Other athletic policies are geared towards maintaining program integrity
through policy that ensures student academic compliancy.  Through these practices, schools guard against unscrupulous individuals or companies seeking to
exploit these student athletes through gambling, compensation schemes,
or potentially even sports drug activities.  All of which
can compromise a student athlete's ability to participate in amateur
sports programs which are proven to cultivate promising futures.
So when Matthew Stanmyre of the New Jersey Star-Ledger reports that
there's a popular trend of junior high school basketball players
purposely being positioned to repeat grades to gain a competitive advantage, one must inquire as to
whether this too is an area in which new or adjusted policy can have an
impact.  The trend of repeating grades is one that has recently been
utilized by student athletes and their families as a method to enhance
the athletic performance of a student while increasing scholarship
recruitment opportunities.  An older, physically more mature student
playing against what essentially amounts to underdeveloped talent, can
and does result in a student athlete appearing more athletically gifted and
subsequently better able to perform.  This clearly can affect a player's
level of collegiate recruitment,  For a talented player and as a strategy;
this approach has worked with bankable success for many players who were in fact offered high-profile scholarships, some of whom now play
professionally.  And even in doing this, students are in fact not stripped of
their capacity to graduate early, as players have an opportunity to
graduate at their original pace by reclassifying to a higher grade once
in high school. Stanmyre explains; "Those high-profile repeaters also
have helped create the latest wrinkle to the repeating trend: Players
reclassifying up a year during high school, in most cases back to their
original grade."
This trend clearly serves as shift in traditional thinking and practice
for how high school athletes and their respective institutions approach
and balance student collegiate aspirations and academic responsibilities.
And while I personally am in favor of "repeating and reclassifying"
for promising athletes; I'm left to ponder, how are these students
qualifying for repeating the grade? Are players intentionally tanking in
the classroom, or are they just not being promoted.  In either instance,
I'm concerned as to whether or not the integrity of academic and
eligibility protocols are institutionally being considered.  One would
assume that players aren't being encourage to demonstrate poor
behavioral discipline in order to qualify for repeating, so there remain questions
about how the particulars of this practice plays out. This is the type
of situation in which adding or altering assessment and oversight policy
might be appropriate as to ensure that the circumstances that
facilitated the introduction and eventual popularity of this trend ultimately do protect students.

http://www.nj.com/hssports/blog/boysbasketball/index.ssf/2013/07/staying
_back_to_get_ahead_high_school_basketball_players_are_staying_back_in_mi
ddle_school_to_get_an.html