The Season Beat the Appeal: What Kollar v. OHSAA Means for High School Eligibility Disputes

Case Analysis | September 9, 2026

The Season Beat the Appeal: What Kollar v. OHSAA Means for High School Eligibility Disputes

There is an uncomfortable reality at the center of almost every high-school eligibility case:

The legal system keeps a different calendar than the sports season.

Courts have briefing schedules, hearings, appeals, transcripts, and standards of review.

Athletes have Friday night.

That difference explains Kollar v. Ohio High School Athletic Association, 2026-Ohio-2954, perhaps better than anything else.

A senior transferred from Ursuline High School to Cardinal Mooney High School. OHSAA determined that its transfer rules restricted his eligibility in football and baseball. Cardinal Mooney sought an exception. OHSAA denied it. An Appeals Panel affirmed. His parents went to court.

And they won.

The Mahoning County Court of Common Pleas ultimately entered a permanent injunction preventing OHSAA from enforcing its eligibility ruling against the student during the 2025–26 school year. He played. He graduated. Cardinal Mooney's baseball season ended.

Then, on July 30, 2026, the Seventh District Court of Appeals dismissed OHSAA's appeal as moot.

That sequence produced an unusual result:

The student won the season, but nobody won the precedent.

The appellate court did not affirm the trial court's conclusion that OHSAA acted arbitrarily. It did not approve the trial court's procedural-due-process analysis. It did not decide how much new evidence a common pleas court may consider when reviewing an OHSAA eligibility decision.

Instead, the Seventh District expressly identified those questions as significant—and then declined to answer them because there was no longer a live controversy.

For athletes and families, Kollar shows that an OHSAA ruling is not necessarily the last word.

For schools and OHSAA, it shows why eligibility litigation can be difficult to obtain appellate guidance on before the athlete's season—and often high-school career—expires.

And for lawyers handling these disputes, the case is a reminder that procedure, timing, preservation of evidence, the scope of the requested injunction, and the theory of judicial review may matter every bit as much as the eligibility bylaw itself.

The Dispute Began With a Senior-Year Transfer

L.K. transferred from Ursuline to Cardinal Mooney at the beginning of his twelfth-grade year.

Because he had previously participated in football and baseball, OHSAA's transfer rules affected his eligibility in those sports. Cardinal Mooney asked OHSAA to apply what the 2025–26 rules identified as Exception 12, an exception addressing qualifying misconduct by an adult associated with the student's former school.

OHSAA rejected the request on October 6, 2025.

The family sought an expedited appeal, and two days later an OHSAA Appeals Panel affirmed the denial.

The dispute then moved from an athletic association to a courtroom.

L.K.'s parents filed a verified complaint alleging that OHSAA's decision was unreasonable, arbitrary, and capricious; that OHSAA's bylaws and procedures violated constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process; and that injunctive and equitable relief was warranted.

The common pleas court ultimately sided with the family.

It declared OHSAA's October 6 ruling arbitrary based on due-process violations, rendered the eligibility ruling null and void, and permanently prohibited OHSAA from interfering with L.K.'s participation in interscholastic athletics during the 2025–26 school year.

That was not a theoretical victory.

It allowed a high-school senior to play while he was still a high-school senior.

And in eligibility litigation, that distinction is everything.

The Exception at the Center of the Case Was Demanding

The particular exception at issue helps explain why the case became legally complicated.

Under then-Exception 12, an athlete could potentially receive relief from the transfer consequence when misconduct by an adult associated with the former school compelled the student to transfer to protect the student's physical or mental well-being.

But the exception was not a general hardship provision.

It contained several specific requirements.

Among other things, the student needed documented evidence that the conduct was directed specifically at the student; the conduct had to be serious enough to trigger a criminal investigation or qualifying mandatory-reporting obligation; the student had to suffer physical harm or severe emotional distress requiring medical or mental-health treatment that was contemporaneously documented; and the transfer could not simply arise from dissatisfaction with coaching methods or playing time.

That last point matters because eligibility exceptions often sound broader in ordinary English than they operate in practice.

A family may have an entirely legitimate reason to leave a school.

That does not necessarily mean the facts satisfy the particular exception being invoked.

Eligibility rules do not ask only whether the transfer made sense. They ask whether the transfer fits the rule.

And Kollar exposed the tension between those two inquiries.

The Seventh District noted that the family had acknowledged during the OHSAA proceedings that it could not satisfy the exception's documentation requirements. Yet after receiving additional evidence during the litigation, the common pleas court reached the opposite ultimate conclusion and found OHSAA's decision arbitrary.

That set up the most important legal question in the case:

When a court reviews an OHSAA eligibility ruling, is it reviewing OHSAA's decision—or retrying the underlying eligibility dispute?

The Seventh District never answered.

Courts Traditionally Give OHSAA Considerable Deference

To understand why that question matters, it helps to go back more than sixty years.

In State ex rel. Ohio High School Athletic Association v. Judges of the Court of Common Pleas of Stark County, 173 Ohio St. 239, 181 N.E.2d 261 (1962), the Supreme Court of Ohio established the basic framework that still shapes judicial review of OHSAA decisions.

The Court recognized OHSAA as a voluntary association whose member schools agree to conduct athletics according to its constitution, bylaws, interpretations, and decisions. It held that, absent mistake, fraud, collusion, or arbitrariness, OHSAA's internal decisions generally are accepted by the courts.

That is significant.

It means an eligibility lawsuit is not normally an appeal in the familiar sense of asking a judge:

“Do you think OHSAA made the right decision?”

The stronger question is:

“Did OHSAA make a decision that Ohio law permits a court to disturb?”

Those are not the same inquiry.

A judge might believe that a student deserves to play while still concluding that OHSAA reasonably applied a properly enacted rule.

Conversely, a court need not decide that the athlete has a general “right to play” if it concludes OHSAA applied its own rule arbitrarily, mistakenly, inconsistently, or outside the lawful bounds of its authority.

That distinction is one of the most important pieces of eligibility litigation.

Fairness may explain why a case gets filed. It does not necessarily supply the legal theory that wins it.

What Does “Arbitrary” Actually Mean?

“Arbitrary” is an appealing word in litigation because almost every disappointed party believes the opposing decision was arbitrary.

The legal standard is narrower.

In Ulliman v. OHSAA, 2009-Ohio-3756, the Second District explained that arbitrariness in this context does not arise merely because a court thinks an exception should have been broader or because application of the rule produces a harsh result.

The court described arbitrary action as action lacking an adequate determining principle or fixed standard and examined whether OHSAA had inconsistently interpreted or applied its rules. It ultimately rejected the athlete's challenge because the evidence did not establish that OHSAA lacked a coherent interpretation, inconsistently applied the rule, or departed from its procedures.

That framework matters in cases like Kollar.

A powerful eligibility challenge should therefore be built around more than hardship.

Potentially meaningful questions include:

Did OHSAA apply the correct bylaw?

Did it interpret the relevant language consistently with prior cases?

Did it disregard evidence the rule required it to consider?

Did it insist upon a requirement that does not actually appear in the rule?

Was its interpretation governed by a coherent standard?

Did it follow its own procedures?

Did similarly situated athletes receive materially different treatment under the same language?

Is the ruling supported by the evidence that was actually before the decision-maker?

Those questions begin to convert an emotional eligibility dispute into a legally reviewable claim.

Then Comes the Harder Question: What Evidence Can the Court Consider?

This is where Kollar gets particularly interesting.

OHSAA argued on appeal that the trial court should have been confined to the evidence presented during the OHSAA process and should not have accepted additional evidence on the merits.

The majority acknowledged that resolving the issue would require deciding a significant question of first impression in Ohio.

Then it stopped.

Because the appeal was moot, the court declined to decide it.

Judge Mark Hanni, however, wrote separately.

His concurrence offers a very different way to conceptualize the proceeding.

Judge Hanni emphasized that the lawsuit was not an administrative appeal from a state agency. OHSAA is a private, voluntary, nonprofit association. The family had brought an injunction action, and the common pleas court had conducted a full trial on the merits.

That distinction mattered to him.

A permanent-injunction trial permits a court to receive evidence and act as a factfinder. Judge Hanni contrasted that process with the OHSAA Appeals Panel proceeding, which he described as limited to 30 minutes, conducted before a three-person panel selected by OHSAA, without sworn testimony or cross-examination.

On that reasoning, Judge Hanni concluded that the trial court properly considered the evidence presented during the injunction proceeding and could determine that OHSAA had acted arbitrarily.

But that was a concurring opinion, not the majority holding.

And that distinction should not get lost.

Kollar does not establish a statewide rule that every student challenging OHSAA eligibility is entitled to start over in common pleas court with new witnesses, new documents, sworn testimony, and a fresh factual record.

The majority expressly refused to decide that question.

An Earlier Case Makes the Record Question Even More Interesting

The First District confronted a related problem in Paige v. OHSAA, 2013-Ohio-4713.

There, the court rejected an attempt by a trial court to essentially substitute new evidence for the evidence considered by OHSAA. But Paige included an important qualification.

The court explained that when a plaintiff actually alleges facts outside the OHSAA proceedings showing that the decision resulted from mistake, fraud, collusion, or arbitrariness, a trial court may have discretion to receive new testimony and conduct factfinding concerning those allegations.

What a trial court cannot do, according to Paige, is simply use a new evidentiary hearing as an excuse to reconsider the entire eligibility determination from scratch when the evidence could have been submitted to OHSAA and no proper independent challenge has been pleaded.

That distinction may ultimately prove central when another Kollar-type case reaches an appellate court before becoming moot.

There is a meaningful difference between:

New evidence offered to prove that the athlete actually qualified for an exception

and

new evidence offered to prove that OHSAA's decision-making itself was mistaken, fraudulent, collusive, or arbitrary.

The first looks much more like a prohibited do-over.

The second fits more naturally within the traditional judicial-review framework.

Future litigation may turn on that line.

And good pleading should recognize it from the beginning.

The Due-Process Question Is Even More Difficult

The common pleas court also concluded that OHSAA's process violated due process.

That conclusion raised a serious doctrinal problem.

Ohio precedent has long held that participation in interscholastic athletics, standing alone, is not a constitutionally protected property or liberty interest.

In Menke v. OHSAA, the First District held that athletic participation itself does not rise to the level of an independent property or liberty interest protected by procedural due process. Ulliman later recognized the same principle.

And Paige confronted an argument remarkably similar to the concern identified in Kollar.

The trial court in Paige believed due process was lacking partly because the athlete could not compel or cross-examine witnesses before the OHSAA Appeals Panel. The First District reversed, reasoning that participation in interscholastic athletics does not itself create the protected property interest necessary to trigger conventional constitutional due-process protections.

That makes the trial court's due-process ruling in Kollar doctrinally significant.

The Seventh District knew it.

Indeed, the majority specifically remarked that the trial court's reasoning potentially called into question OHSAA's longstanding use of unsworn testimony in eligibility proceedings.

But again, the court declined to resolve the issue.

The result is important for anyone reading Kollar too broadly.

The case does not hold that:

Those questions remain largely where they were before Kollar.

So Why Didn't the Seventh District Decide Any of This?

Because by the time the appeal was ready for decision, there was no longer a high-school eligibility dispute to resolve.

L.K. graduated from Cardinal Mooney on May 24, 2026.

Cardinal Mooney's baseball season ended June 13 in the Division IV state semifinal.

His ability to compete in high-school sports was over.

Ohio appellate courts have repeatedly treated that circumstance as moot.

The First, Second, Fifth, and Ninth Districts have all considered variations of the same problem: when the athlete graduates or the relevant athletic participation ends, a court ordinarily can no longer grant meaningful relief concerning the student's eligibility.

The Seventh District followed that line of authority.

And although Ohio recognizes an exception for disputes “capable of repetition, yet evading review,” the exception generally requires a reasonable expectation that the same complaining party will face the same action again.

A graduating senior cannot satisfy that requirement merely because other athletes will undoubtedly encounter similar eligibility disputes in the future.

That creates something close to a structural problem in eligibility litigation.

A high-school season may last a few months.

Appellate litigation can last much longer.

The issue may repeat. The plaintiff cannot.

That makes appellate precedent unusually difficult to obtain.

The Mootness Analysis Also Contains a Litigation Lesson About the School

There is one important wrinkle.

OHSAA's bylaws contain a restitution provision permitting certain sanctions if an athlete competes pursuant to a court order and that judicial relief is later vacated, stayed, reversed, or otherwise determined to have been unjustified.

Potential sanctions can include vacating performances, forfeiting victories, returning awards or tournament receipts, monetary penalties, and imposing a ruling during a subsequent season.

In Ulliman, an injunction expressly protected both the athlete and the school from OHSAA sanctions.

That gave the dispute continuing life because the school still faced potential consequences after the student's immediate eligibility issue ended.

Kollar was different.

Cardinal Mooney appeared in the case as a nominal defendant, but the injunction did not prohibit OHSAA from later using its restitution bylaw against the school.

Because the order protected L.K.'s participation but did not eliminate OHSAA's sanction authority, the Seventh District concluded there was no continuing controversy sufficient to keep the appeal alive.

That may sound like a technical procedural distinction.

It is not.

It shows that the wording of the injunction can affect not only what happens during the season, but whether the resulting legal questions survive long enough to receive appellate review.

In eligibility litigation, remedy drafting is part of the strategy.

Kollar Also Shows Why the Administrative Record Matters Before Anyone Files Suit

The most practical lesson from Kollar may not concern mootness or constitutional law at all.

It concerns evidence.

The exception at issue required documentation.

The appellate court specifically noted the concession that those documentation requirements had not been satisfied during the OHSAA proceedings.

That should matter to every athlete, family, school administrator, and lawyer dealing with eligibility.

There is a natural temptation to treat the OHSAA process as the warm-up and litigation as the “real case.”

That is dangerous.

The better assumption is the opposite:

Build the OHSAA record as though a judge will eventually read every page of it.

If the exception requires contemporaneous medical documentation, get it.

If it requires evidence of a complaint, preserve it.

If the dispute concerns harassment, preserve emails, screenshots, incident reports, witness information, and communications with administrators.

If causation matters, establish a chronology showing why and when the transfer decision was made.

If the school is requesting the exception, make sure the request addresses every element instead of simply describing why the situation feels compelling.

The safest litigation record is usually the one built before litigation becomes necessary.

The Appeals Panel Is Not a General Court of Fairness

OHSAA's current guidance explains another point that families frequently misunderstand: the Appeals Panel does not possess free-ranging authority to waive or rewrite eligibility rules because it believes a result is unfair.

Its stated role is to determine whether the Executive Director's Office made an error interpreting the bylaws.

That makes the framing of an appeal critical.

A weak appeal says:

“Please let this student play because this situation is unfair.”

A stronger appeal says:

“This is the governing provision. These are its elements. This evidence satisfies those elements. This is the specific interpretive or factual error in the ruling below.”

Sympathy can help explain a case.

Structure wins arguments.

And the Rules Have Already Changed Since Kollar

There is another reason not to read Kollar as a static guide to every future transfer case.

OHSAA's transfer framework changed for the 2026–27 school year.

The adult-conduct exception involved in Kollar was identified as Exception 12 under the rules applicable to L.K.'s transfer. OHSAA's current transfer materials now list the Adult Criminal Behavior provision as Exception 6.

Even more importantly, member schools approved an entirely new pathway—Bylaw 4-7-8—effective for 2026–27.

Under that provision, full eligibility may be restored when the superintendents or heads of school from both OHSAA member school systems enter into a memorandum of understanding confirming that the transfer is necessary to protect the student's physical or mental well-being or address other appropriate extenuating circumstances. The provision can be used up to twice during a student's high-school career.

That new rule is significant in light of Kollar.

The old dispute required a family to fit serious circumstances into a tightly defined exception with stringent documentation requirements.

The new MOU provision potentially creates another route for certain well-being and hardship transfers—provided the schools cooperate and the requirements are addressed before the opportunity disappears.

It reinforces a recurring theme in eligibility law:

The best time to analyze an eligibility dispute is before there is one.

What Kollar Does Hold

For all the questions the decision leaves unanswered, Kollar does establish several useful points.

First, an individual eligibility dispute ordinarily becomes moot once the athlete graduates and the relevant season concludes.

Second, the “capable of repetition yet evading review” exception ordinarily will not save the case merely because other athletes may face the same problem.

Third, continuing exposure of a school to OHSAA sanctions can matter to mootness, but the scope of the injunction and the parties before the court are critical.

Fourth, the Seventh District recognizes that substantial unresolved questions remain concerning the permissible scope of judicial review of OHSAA eligibility rulings.

And fifth, at least one member of the panel—Judge Hanni—would permit a common pleas court conducting a permanent-injunction trial to consider evidence beyond the OHSAA record when determining whether OHSAA acted arbitrarily.

That last proposition is important.

It is also not yet the law announced by a majority of the Seventh District.

What Kollar Does Not Hold

Equally important is what the case does not establish.

Kollar does not hold that every OHSAA eligibility denial can be retried from scratch in common pleas court.

It does not eliminate the substantial deference Ohio courts traditionally afford OHSAA.

It does not establish that an Appeals Panel proceeding lacking sworn testimony and cross-examination violates due process.

It does not create a constitutional right to participate in interscholastic athletics.

And it does not transform a sympathetic transfer into an automatic eligibility exception.

Those propositions remain subject to older Ohio precedent and, in some instances, await another case capable of reaching an appellate decision before the clock runs out.

What Future Eligibility Litigation Will Probably Fight About

The next significant OHSAA eligibility case may not be about whether a student has a compelling story.

It may be about what a court is legally allowed to do with that story.

Expect future cases to test questions such as:

Those are not merely academic questions.

For the next athlete standing on the sideline, they could determine whether he or she plays at all.

The Bigger Lesson

Eligibility disputes compress an extraordinary amount of law into an extraordinarily small amount of time.

There are association bylaws.

There are internal appeals.

There are evidentiary questions.

There is the law governing voluntary associations.

There may be constitutional arguments, statutory rights, contract principles, disability law, discrimination law, or equitable doctrines.

And over all of it hangs a calendar that does not care whether the lawyers are finished.

Kollar captures that problem perfectly.

The common pleas court intervened in time for the remedy to matter.

The athlete played.

OHSAA appealed.

And before Ohio's appellate courts could answer the most consequential legal questions presented by the case, the student graduated and the season ended.

The law ran out of controversy because the athlete ran out of high school.

That leaves Kollar in an unusual position.

It is important not because it definitively tells us how Ohio courts must resolve the next eligibility challenge.

It is important because it identifies exactly where the next fight is likely to occur.

And perhaps its most useful lesson is the simplest:

In eligibility cases, winning eventually may be indistinguishable from losing. The case has to be built—and, when necessary, litigated—while there is still a season left to save.

This article provides general information regarding high-school athletic eligibility and litigation and is not legal advice. Eligibility disputes are highly fact-specific and depend on the rules, statutes, policies, and case law in effect at the time of the dispute.