Karin Millican admits there were difficult days during the past 3½ years as she and others pushed to get nontraditional students included on public school sports teams.

“I absolutely thought it would be rewarded at some point in time,” the Rainsville home-school mother of two said. “But there were ups and downs. There were days where the news was good and days when the news was bad.”

April 12 was a day for good news as the Alabama High School Athletic Association (AHSAA) Central Board of Control and AHSAA Legislative Council approved a bylaw that grants athletic eligibility for nontraditional students, which includes those who are home-schooled, virtual-school students or students attending a charter school.

The bylaw, Proposal 8, ratifies athletic eligibility for nontraditional students and will go into effect after the current academic year. Similar proposals have passed in other states and are often referred to as the “Tim Tebow rule” in reference to the former University of Florida quarterback who was home-schooled.

“I see it as a win-win all the way around for everybody involved,” said Millican, a former sixth-grade teacher and varsity girls basketball coach. “It just makes sense to me that children who can prove they’re getting a good education would be able to take advantage of a public opportunity that’s funded by public dollars that their parents helped fund.”

AHSAA Executive Director Steve Savarese said the association has been transitioning toward this move for about a year after the state Legislature passed a law allowing virtual-school students to participate in interscholastic athletics.

Every school system in Alabama has to have a virtual-school component, which means a child can stay at home and take classes online through the public education system within their school district.

“They’ll be eligible to graduate or do anything any other student does,” Savarese said. “As the platform for education continues to change, our bylaws adapted to the new opportunities in education.

“State law states that all applicable Alabama High School Athletic Association rules apply,” he continued. “The only difference is he’s not within the brick and mortar of a traditional school.”

Football is the sport most people focus on with the new rule. (contributed)

Students will adhere to all AHSAA rules on academic accountability. Home-school students will be required to take AHSAA-criteria tests in all four core subjects at the end of each semester for academic eligibility beginning with seventh grade through the end of the first semester in 12^th grade.

Home-school students who take core courses through a school’s virtual program, or who gain college course credit, are not required to take the criteria tests.

Nontraditional students will have the same opportunity to try out for sports teams as traditional students. They may not practice any more than their public school cohorts.

Jay Driver has worked on getting home-school students on public school sports teams since his oldest daughter, Jordan, was 11. Now she’s 22.

The father of 10 won’t directly benefit from the bylaw, he said, because participating student-athletes must attend two classes at the school where they enroll, likely physical education and an elective.

That places another burden on home-school parents, he said, while praising the bylaw.

“I’m in favor of it and I’m thankful for it,” the former coach and now full-time pastor said. “It’s not quite what I want but it’s going to help a lot of home-schoolers.

“Both sides have had to kind of give up a lot to get something that helps somebody. The AHSAA has come a long way in trying to address the issue. They’ve gone from being adversarial in the beginning to being partners with us now.”

Driver praised Millican for her persistence in seeing the effort through.

“She, by her own sheer will and effort, is probably 85 to 90 percent responsible for this actually being pushed to where it is today,” he said. “The reason I’ve been in it so long is not so much persistence but because I have 10 kids. If I only had two, I would have probably dropped out of this after Jordan was 17 years old. But because I had other kids coming up behind her, I still stayed in it.”