They came, they won, they left.
Jeremiah Criddell and Sean Dollars transferred from Rancho Cucamonga High School to Mater Dei before the 2018-19 school year. Criddell, a safety, and Dollars, a running back, contributed to Mater Dei’s successful season that yielded CIF-Southern Section and CIF State titles and earned the Monarchs recognition as national champions.
Criddell and Dollars were also among the signees in the Mater Dei gym on Dec. 19 when the school had a national letter of intent signing ceremony.
A few weeks later they withdrew from Mater Dei and re-enrolled at Rancho Cucamonga. They participated in National Signing Day activities Wednesday at Rancho Cucamonga.
Senior receiver Braedin Huffman-Dixon transferred from Roosevelt of Eastvale to Mater Dei before the 2018-19 school year. He recently returned to Roosevelt for the current semester.
Rancho Cucamonga football head coach Mark Verti said, “This is the way high school football is now.”
Verti became Rancho Cucamonga’s coach in March, two months after Nick Baiz resigned from the position. Criddell and Dollars had already departed Rancho Cucamonga for Mater Dei.
“We already were hearing rumors that they would come back here for the second semester (of the 2018-19 school year),” Verti said. “We’re not the only school this has happened to.”
Criddell and Dollars are another example of high school sports free agents – student-athletes who transfer to a school not because they want to be part of the school’s culture but mostly because they want to be part of a championship team and/or increase their opportunities to get a scholarship.
Criddell and Dollars were getting recruited before they transferred to Mater Dei. In December Criddell (5-11, 188) signed with Oklahoma and Dollars (5-10, 185) signed with Oregon.
Dollars, an All-Trinity League first-team selection, was Mater Dei’s second-leading rusher in 2018 with 586 yards and 10 rushing touchdowns. His 33 receptions were third-most on the team. Criddell had 29 tackles.
That Criddell and Dollars popped in and out of Mater Dei like the school is a fast-food drive-thru is not good optics. Mater Dei is frequently included in the conversation, in media and social media, when people discuss what they see as the unsavory traffic of high-profile transfers in Southern California high school athletics.
Justin Alumbaugh, the football head coach at De La Salle of Concord that lost to Mater Dei in the 2017 and ’18 CIF State Open Division championship games, told the San Jose Mercury News he was astonished when he learned of the Criddell and Dollars back-and-forth moves.
“That type of behavior just kind of seems to be the antithesis of what educational athletics is about,” Alumbaugh said. “That isn’t who we have been and isn’t who we are. Our process is just a lot different than that.
“We’re not saying that all transfers are bad. That’s illogical. If you look at it, transferring in for a semester, that’s transferring for one specific thing.”
Mater Dei does not lead Orange County or Southern California in student-athlete transfers. The school gets plenty of them, sure. Schools that win a lot and have college-scholarship athletes will attract transfers.
But because it’s Mater Dei with all of its championships – Mater Dei won the 2017-18 school year CIF-SS Commissioner’s Cup, in both boys and girls athletics, that goes to the massive section’s top performing athletic program – Mater Dei gets heavy scrutiny.
Mater Dei president Pat Murphy on Friday said his school already had put into place more rigid standards for accepting transfers soon after the Monarchs forfeited their 2018 season-opening win over Bishop Amat in August. Mater Dei forfeited that game for using an ineligible player, an international transfer who was a senior.
“After the issue with the ineligible player,” Murphy said, “we reformed our admission process with transfers. We added an extra set of people to check and double-check, and tightened up our transfer policies.”
Murphy said Friday that Mater Dei has so far accepted only one football transfer from what he said was “a number” of transfer applications that he declined to specify. That transfer is offensive lineman Andrew Ueli-Fa’atoalia (6-3, 295) from La Habra where he was All-Freeway League first team.
Trinity League schools want to win and win big, and so do their checks-writing alumni. Chuck Petersen at Orange Lutheran, Scott Meyer at Servite and most recently Rich Fisher at Santa Margarita weren’t fired at those schools because they violated school policies. They were shown the door because they were losing players and games to other Trinity League schools.
Mater Dei is trying to find that balance of winning while having student-athletes who adhere to the school’s stated mission and philosophy. Sometimes it is apparent that a few parents of the Trinity League’s better football players are unaware that their school even has a mission and philosophy.
The CIF-Southern Section recently created a transfer rules committee. What this committee can accomplish, what new rules it could concoct that would stand up to legal challenges, is unclear this early in the committee’s life.
Putting a halt to high school sports free agents will be a primary goal.
“I don’t know of anybody who could’ve imagined it getting to this level,” Alumbaugh said.
It has. And it’s not good for anybody. Not for Mater Dei, not for Rancho Cucamonga and not for high school sports.
It’s also not good for the student-athletes who are not learning about loyalty and commitment.
The adults who are supposed to help create responsible and accountable adults, whether they be coaches, administrators and (especially) parents are letting these young people down.
