Top High School Athletes Find Openings in Transfer Loopholes

Here’s a hypothetical question for parents of high school violin prodigies: If your child has the potential to play for a big-time college band and possibly make lots of bucks in the pros, would it be justifiable to uproot your family and move to a town with a great high school violin program just so junior could improve his skills?

The man asking this question is Danny Klein, an L.A. businessman with a wife and three children who moved from a Malibu house into a two-bedroom Carson apartment so that his son Perry could attend Carson High.

The move received a lot of attention but not because Perry was a violin prodigy--he was a standout quarterback who had thrown 36 touchdown passes the previous year at Palisades. When the family got flak on radio talk shows from people who thought that the Kleins had lost their perspective--a TV station also aired helicopter shots of their before-and-after residences--Danny used the violin analogy to explain his motives.

“If you can better your child’s violin abilities,” he told anybody who asked, “and that child wants to transfer, why not go to a school that gives him a chance to excel?”

Perry Klein’s transfer to Carson High in the spring of 1988 did not ignite a trend among top high school athletes--only a handful of families have since made the sacrifice for the sake of their superstar’s athletic career. Most recently, state sprint champion Marion Jones and her mother moved to Thousand Oaks, with Marion transferring from Rio Mesa High to Thousand Oaks.

Parents take drastic steps--from moving to sending their child to live with a legal guardian--to sidestep a state rule that forces a transfer student to sit out a year in his sport unless his family establishes residence in that community. The rule discourages recruiting but it effectively turns parents into plotters to give their athletes immediate eligibility.

“People who want badly enough to disrupt their own lives to beat us can beat us,” said Hal Harkness, City Section commissioner.

And according to state high school officials, parents have gone to great lengths to circumvent the residency rule, which requires that the family must move as a unit unless the parents are divorced or separated.

Record-breaking quarterback John Walsh transferred from West Torrance High to Carson for the 1990 football season when his father filed for divorce and rented an apartment in the Carson school district. Left behind to live in Torrance were the wife and four other children. Like Klein, Walsh led Carson to the City 4-A Division title. After the season, the parents reconciled and father and son moved back to Torrance, Harkness said.

“They followed all our rules and procedures,” Harkness said, adding that the officials are powerless in these situations. “If you go to court, they kill you because you have these loopholes” in the rule, he said.

When Perry Klein attended Carson, Harkness said the family played games with the City: “I believe the mother went back to Malibu” to live during the season (the Kleins’ two daughters were in college during this time).

But Harkness feels that the City should have been more diligent in playing detective. “We blew it,” he said. “We lost track of it. We could have blown it apart.”

Danny Klein claims that City personnel did check on him. He said the apartment manager told him that strangers were asking questions about the family and knocking on their door to see whether anyone was home.

“This is a free country,” Klein said. “Why do I have to prove anything?”

Because Perry Klein was a high-profile athlete, that’s why. New students move into a school district all the time, and no doubt some of them are upwardly mobile athletes, but their moves go largely unnoticed by the public and high school officials. “Lesser athletes just show up with a new address,” Danny Klein said.

Indeed, said Harkness, “You only hear about it when the Perry Kleins do it. California has a very mobile population. We can’t--nor care to--get into the psyche of everyone who moves.”

Jason Evans, a quarterback at Loyola High as a junior, wanted to concentrate on baseball when he transferred to Chatsworth High in 1989. His parents, Kay and Richard Evans, gave up their West L.A. apartment and moved into a Chatsworth apartment so that Jason could play shortstop under Bob Lofrano at Chatsworth.

Although Jason was a Times All-Valley selection and now attends Oklahoma on a baseball scholarship, the move to Chatsworth had its downside for the family. “Any move is major,” Kay said, adding that she and her husband also had a more difficult commute to work.

Danny Klein also said the experience “wasn’t easy.” However, like the Evans family, he feels that “it was well worth” the inconvenience. Perry, who is expected to start at California next fall, “got a whole lot of experience and preparation for college that he wouldn’t have gotten at Pacific Palisades,” his father said.

Unlike the Evanses and Kleins--who returned to their old neighborhoods as soon as their boys were finished with sports--Joe Palmisano didn’t have to relocate to get his daughter Michelle into Thousand Oaks High.

Three years ago, Palmisano, who lives in the Buena High attendance area in Ventura, sent Michelle, the youngest of his eight children, to live with her sister Dina. Dina, 10 years older than Michelle, lives within the Thousand Oaks school district borders and is also an assistant girls’ basketball coach at the high school. She was made Michelle’s legal guardian.

“It was not a hard decision,” Joe said. “We felt Michelle had better opportunities and would get better publicized in Thousand Oaks.”

Michelle, now a senior, holds the Ventura County career scoring mark and is a top-ranked student in her class. She recently signed a letter of intent to play at UCLA. “The move was best for Michelle, and everyone,” Joe Palmisano said.

If California wanted to tighten its transfer requirements, it could adopt a rule in effect in Indiana, which has problems with illegal recruiting in basketball. The Indiana High School Activities Assn. will declare an athlete ineligible if it learns that he and his parents have moved for athletic reasons. Of course, Indiana parents have discovered how to beat that rule.

“There’s no way to prove anything if parents are smart enough to keep their mouths shut,” said Gene Cato, commissioner of Indiana’s state association.