Missoulian article from the December 22, 2012 edition - Hellgate 4-0 going into holidays after blitzing Butte : Boys' Basketball - and athletic transfers comments

Click on the link below to read about the Hellgate High School Boys Basketball Varsity team -

Hellgate 4-0 going into holidays after blitzing Butte : Boys' Basketball


The Missoulian newsprint edition of this story is headlined, "Tinkle powers Knights" with a picture of Tres Tinkle guarding a Butte player.

This brings up the subject of transferring athletes from one school to another in a school system.

Last season this was a hot topic as not only did Tres Tinkle transfer as a freshman from Big Sky High School but there were many other transfers on the Hellgate High School team from other areas such as Frenchtown and Florence.

Things were not getting off to a good start last season at Big Sky High School as Coach Lasovich resigned and the school hired a new coach.  The team was struggling under Ty Solberg. To be fair, things were not all that rosy under the coaching leadership of Coach Lasovich and perhaps Solberg's team would have shown improvement during the year had the team remained intact in addition to working out the kinks throughout the season. Tres Tinkle played on the Big Sky team one week and the very next week transferred to Hellgate and was immediately playing on Hellgate's JV team.

The significant question is - IS THIS FAIR TO PLAYERS THAT LIVE IN THE BOUNDARIES OF HELLGATE HIGH SCHOOL?

The answer is an emphatic NO!

For Tres Tinkle to walk on the JV team at Hellgate is unfair to every JV player that was on the team last year.  msw was aware of  complaints from some of the JV parents about this lack of fairness for their boys.

In the first season of Jeff Hays coaching career at Hellgate High School, two transfer students from Sentinel played on the Varsity team. To begin with this means that two players were not selected from the Hellgate boundary area and did not even have a chance at playing basketball.

One of these Sentinel transfer players started in every game and the other played sporadically. These players had played on the Sentinel Spartans team the year before. 

The transfers took away playing time for some of the seniors that had played for Hellgate their entire high school years. Many of these seniors displayed a lot of talent in previous years for the Knights and were thrown under the bus by Coach Jeff Hays and his staff.

In comments published in last years Missoulian articles addressing this topic one can read that many people have grave concerns about allowing rampant transferring of high school athletes. The majority of comments were that indeed, as mentioned above, it is not fair to the current players on the team and also to the players that have been playing at the lower levels and were slated to move up to JV or Varsity.

What came out of the online discussion is that athletes NEED TO WAIT OUT A YEAR before trying out to play at the newly transferred to school.  THIS IS FAIR.

One may say - the Hellgate boys in the district need to just practice more and get better so that they can compete with the transfers.

The above statement is right on. There are so few spots, however, on a basketball team - 12-14 players.  So even if a player is really working hard and shows some talent, his/her chances to make the team and to play significant time on the team is decreased by the transferring athlete(s).

So - do basketball players in this era, that live within the Hellgate High School boundaries and want to have a chance to play basketball need to think seriously about looking at his chances of playing at other area schools?  YES. Hellgate High School has a high number of student athlete transfers. 

Another aspect of the Hellgate Knights Boys basketball team is that even if an athlete exhibits great talent currently and in past years he may not be asked to play a lot. This is because, with all due respect, the father/son coaching duo show favoritism with their players.  If they do not like a player they will not play him even if a player has quite good stats on the state level. Can one say cold hearted and callous? - YES.


This topic has many tentacles that could be broached here. One could read the many comments from last years discussions on student athlete transfers by using google.

The article mentioned above was published in February of 2012.  The Missoulian deletes comments after articles after a unknown time period.  This is unfortunate as there were many valuable comments posted.

edited on March 21, 2013, March 23, 2013