When Barry Groomes entered the office for the Hooten’s Arkansas Football magazine on the morning of June 1, 2024, there was no way he could prepare for what was about to take place that day.

He and the rest of the Little Rock-based magazine’s staff were already on deadline to get that year’s edition completed when the phone suddenly began to ring. Then it happened again and again and again.

The phone calls came from various high school football coaches throughout the state, and the conversations that took place were almost the same. The coaches were informing the magazine that one or more players had left their respective schools to go elsewhere.

“On that day — the first Monday in June and the first day of summer workouts for a lot of schools — we had 30 coaches call our office with transfers,” Groomes said. “We figured out there were over 150 players that had transferred that day.

“And that was just coaches who let us know. There were about five times as many transfers that didn’t get noticed.”

Many wanted to place the blame on the LEARNS Act — a bill signed into law in March 2023 by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders that allowed students to go to the school of their choice without penalty. But the transfers actually began to take place after the passing of Act 768 of 2023, which amended the previous transfer rule and allowed students to transfer from one school to another for athletic purposes without penalty as long as the transfer was done by May 1 of each year.

The plethora of football transfers received a majority of the attention, but the same thing was going on in other sports throughout the state’s high schools. In fact, it appeared to be a similar version of what currently takes place with college athletes and the transfer portal.

“The LEARNS Act didn’t have anything in it about athletics,” Arkansas Activities Association Executive Director Lance Taylor said. “That was all about academics, which we were fine with. It wasn’t even really an issue because that’s what we’re about. We’re about education first, and that’s what the LEARNS Act was about.

“When the laws were changed, then it started looking like college athletics. That worried me. If we were going to save it, something had to be done. If it was going to be about amateur sports and it was going to be education first, then that’s when we got involved in trying to figure out a way to make a level playing field for all the students in the state.”

The result was Act 475 of 2025, which was passed by the state Legislature earlier this year and placed restrictions on students transferring from one school to another. Under the act, students in grades 7 through 10 have until June 1 — beginning next year — before they begin that grade to transfer from one school to another without having to lose a year of athletic eligibility.

The transfer law applies to all the state schools, regardless of whether they are public, private, charter or a home-school situation. Under a previous school choice law that was in place, those transfers had to be done by May 1 this year.

“It didn’t just do that for the public schools,” Taylor said. “It did it for the private schools, the home-schooler and the charter schools. They all have the same transfer date now, which is something we really like. It treats every kid alike in the state of Arkansas, and I think that’s important.

“You can still transfer four out of the six years, and that’s a lot. I think that’s fair, and it gives them a chance to figure out where they belong. That’s still a lot of transferring, to tell you the truth. I was good with the date because it gets them out of school and gives them a chance to get somewhere else. That’s important before the summer starts because that’s when the schools start going (to) 7-on-7 (tournaments), team camps in volleyball and basketball and stuff like that.”

Athletes going into 11th and 12th grades who seek a transfer will have to sit out 365 days before they could participate in athletics, with two exceptions. One pertains to a student who has already transferred to one school but wishes to return to the school district where his family currently resides, as long as it’s done within the first 11 days of the semester.

The second exception would be if a student’s family makes what is considered a bona fide move from one school district to another. It means the family must completely leave its current residence behind and move into a new location in another school district instead of possibly leaving the first location so an older family member can live there.

Transfer fallout

While a high school athlete who transfers from one school to another does it for personal reasons, Taylor points out that the effects from such a move are actually three-fold.

“(Former AAA Executive Director) Jimmy Coats always told me when you deal with transfers, there are three things you have to look at,” Taylor said. “No. 1, you have to look at the school they’re leaving. Supposing they’re pretty good athletes, is it fair to those other kids at that school when you’re supposed to be a leader of that school district?

“Second, they are going to another school. There is some kid who has lived there all their life and their parents paid taxes for that district, and that person (who transfers) will knock out that kid (from a position), so you have to think of that. Is it fair to those kids? Then the third thing … is it fair to those teams who play in the same conference or classification? Is it fair to all those?”‘

Still, that didn’t keep student-athletes from testing the new waters and taking their talents to a new location.

Groomes estimated that on most of the Class 7A teams — particularly those in metro areas with 150 or more players on their rosters — that 15% to 2o% of the roster were new names. If that trend continued throughout the state, where about 6,500 students play high school football, Groomes said about 1,500 of them were transfers from another school.

With things like that happening in other sports, Taylor said he knew the time to stop it was now.

“High school athletics is now the last amateur sport there is,” Taylor said. “You know what’s happening with the (name, image and likeness) and the transfer portal in college. High school athletics is an amateur sport, and 98% of those students will never play another game after 12th grade. That’s (NCAA) Division I, II, III and juco.

“You don’t want students playing on an uneven playing field before they even start a game. That’s not what we are about. That’s not what we’re trying to teach kids. We’re trying to teach them all the tangibles they can use for life lessons for the rest of their life.”

A level playing field was what the Fort Smith Public Schools intended to keep between its two high schools when it began to use a rule that didn’t allow transfers inside the district and made students who did so ineligible. It was implemented by the late Jim Rowland when he served as the district’s athletic director, and that rule became the standard for several years.

That longstanding rule, however, was recently challenged by a virtual student inside the school district who participated in extracurricular activities at Northside High School but wanted to switch to Southside. The student’s father took the school district to court and lost in Sebastian County Circuit Court, but won an appeal to the Arkansas Supreme Court by a 4-3 decision.

“We are a rival town, separated by Rogers Avenue,” Fort Smith Athletic Director Michael Beaumont said. “There were stipulations on how and when you could transfer from one school to another. At that time, I think Coach Rowland and the district had something in place that parents could follow where they could transfer inside the district.

“Going from Northside to Southside, you’re not changing school districts. You’re still in the same school district, so we ruled that being ‘inner-district’ and we had our set of rules. We didn’t see that as an issue. In fact, we were confident enough, as was the (circuit) court, because it ruled in our favor.”

There wasn’t much time to produce much fallout from the lawsuit, however. Beaumont said all of this had transpired while things were about to change with the state legislature passing Act 475. It didn’t give Fort Smith students time to follow the virtual student’s lead and petition for another transfer.

Meanwhile, Beaumont said he is content with the newness that act brings to the school district and transfer rules.

“That gives us more guidance to follow,” Beaumont said. “All we ever do is try to follow guidelines because we feel what is good for one is good enough for everyone, whether it’s a Rogers or a (Rogers) Heritage student or a Northside or a Southside student or even an Atkins student. We all try to follow the same rules.

“I really think a lot of parents were just waiting to see what was going to happen.”

Last-minute work

The numerous calls Groomes and his co-workers received that June day last year meant only one thing: More work, and there wasn’t much time to get it done.

The work was more than the changes made to several of the 200-plus team previews inside the magazine. It also meant changes to its preseason all-state teams, which consist of the top 22 players in each of the state’s six classifications, and any adjustments that needed to be made if those players switched to a team in a different classification.

Groomes said most of the transfers came from three locations in the state, including Northwest Arkansas. He said transfers that took place in the Little Rock-metro area “was beyond belief compared to the rest of the state,” while he was surprised by the number of transfers in Northeast Arkansas, which includes Jonesboro, Osceola, Blytheville and Rivercrest.

“It was very frustrating,” Groomes said. “I figured it up, and over 20% of our super team players had transferred. Last year, out of our top 50 recruits in the state, 20 of them changed schools. So you’re at 40% of the top players that transferred.

“It doesn’t shock me because of the day and age that we live in with college athletics. It’s trickled down to high school with players freely transferring at the drop of a hat. Basically, it’s come down to a free-agent market for college athletics, and it’s trickling down to the high school ranks.”

Groomes said last year’s magazine was still being edited as late as July 8, when a transfer of a football player led to a significant change.

That was not the case this year. Hooten’s Arkansas Football magazine was finished much earlier and began hitting store shelves across the state July 4, and the May 1 deadline for transfers to take place this year made the staff’s job a lot easier.

“If not, there was no way to get it accurate,” Groomes said. “We had already made a decision that if we’re going to publish a magazine that was going to be inaccurate, we might as well do it. If we held off to make it accurate with all the players moving around, it was going to be August before you found out where some of these players were going.”

Groomes also said that three players who the magazine considered among the state’s top 10 recruits had already made the move to another school before the May 1 deadline.

But he also warned that it’s was only a matter of time before the ruling would be challenged and another trip to the courtroom likely. He pointed out that such a lawsuit has been filed in Cleveland County, where a school superintendent refused to allow a student-athlete to transfer to another school while seven other students were able to do the same thing.

“I’m expecting lawsuits to come to forms of state government and local school districts,” Groomes said. “I think they’re going to cite coaching changes. The NCAA allows it — if there’s a coaching change, you can transfer with no questions asked. Anybody can transfer, and nobody can stop you.

“I think you’re going to see that in the high school ranks. We already have a few lawsuits out there that have been filed, and unfortunately the AAA has to be named in these lawsuits even though they have nothing to do with it.”