By late January, Jeremy Navarre will have earned enough credits to leave Joppatowne High School and enroll in classes at the University of Maryland. In the spring, he will join the Terps at football practice.
The senior All-Metro football player and heavyweight wrestler will take advantage of a national trend called early enrollment, a process designed to allow athletes to make an early transition to college life.
But that's nothing new.
What is new is the wrinkle Navarre has added, one that will allow him to retain his high school athletic eligibility long enough to compete for a third state wrestling title in March.
Navarre, 17, plans to take two courses at Maryland while also taking a course at Joppatowne to maintain his sports eligibility.
The move will permit him to complete the wrestling season at Joppatowne, which could end with the March 4-5 state tournament at Maryland's Cole Field House, and also to participate in the Terps' spring practices, which began in April last year.
"He'll be enrolled at Joppatowne in accordance with regulations that say he has to be enrolled and attending to represent his school, so he meets the criteria of remaining high school-eligible," said MPSSAA executive director Ned Sparks, who approved the plan last month.
The majority of state administrators contacted by The Sun have no issue with the ruling.
But others, such as Dr. Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, worry that Navarre has opened a Pandora's Box.
"It may be a win-win situation for the state of Maryland and this particular athlete, but I worry about setting a precedent for other high school athletes and teams under different circumstances," said Lapchick, author of a forthcoming book entitled The Future of Ethics in College Sports.
"I would be critical of a process that allows him to be in school [a college] on one level, yet to compete at a lower level in order to win a championship."
`Earlier the better'
Under a plan devised by his father, George, Navarre plans to start the process on Jan. 26 - the start of the second semester for both Joppatowne and Maryland - five days after having earned enough credits to graduate from high school.
"I'll get a feeling for the [Maryland] campus from a social perspective, an academic perspective and also in football," said Navarre, who was named The Sun's Male Athlete of the Year for 2003-04. "Especially in football, I want to get down there and get on that [college] level as soon as possible ... the earlier the better."
