The representative council for the Michigan High School Athletic Association has approved new governing rules for football, tennis, girls wrestling and boys volleyball and a $15.7 million operating budget for 2025-26.
The announcement came down after the MHSAA’s annual spring meeting in Gaylord. The biggest change might be the rules for football forfeits and the effect on playoff points.
Here are changes of note, including football forfeits, playoff formats and transfer rule changes:
MHSAA football
The council approved two football council recommendations which will start in the 2025 fall season:
MHSAA tennis
The finals will be played over four days in a two-week span. One division will play on Wednesday and Thursday, followed by another on Friday and Saturday, with the other two divisions repeating the same schedule the following week.
MHSAA girls wrestling
District and regional team championships will be awarded during the 2025-26 season for the first time. Champions for all rounds will be determined by results from individual brackets. Head-to-head matchups between the teams are on the horizon as the sport continues to grow.
MHSAA boys volleyball
Schools can also join together for cooperative boys volleyball teams if the combined enrollment of the schools involved is less than 3,500 students.
MHSAA transfer exception changes
Previously, the rule stated a student must complete 90 days at the new school district before potentially returning. The change was made to solidify and better define the “full and complete” exception.
“We want to make sure that when a student and the student’s family or people that the student lives with make the full and complete move and ask for immediate eligibility, that this is indeed a full and complete move that is potentially long-lasting,” MHSAA communications director Geoff Kimmerly said. “Not something where someone is moving for, let’s say a season or let’s say for the amount of time needed to play a specific sport just to gain that eligibility.”
Any people who move with the student must also complete 180 school days in the new district, or that student will lose eligibility in all sports until the move is approved by both school districts and the MHSAA.
“Say I am unable to sell my house and so I enter a lease agreement with someone to rent it instead,” Kimmerly said. “This is to ensure that it’s not just me saying someone’s going to rent my house for three months and then when that three months is up and my child’s season is over, my family’s going to move back into our house.
“Saying this is a year-long lease is meant to really strengthen that full residential move that we have left our house, and maybe we can’t sell our house, but we have left our house and we are not showing intent on immediately returning to it.”
Jared Ramsey covers high school sports for the Detroit Free Press. Contact him at jramsey@freepress.com; Follow Jared on X or Bluesky.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: MHSAA rule changes for 2025-26: Football forfeits, playoff formats, transfers
Reporting by Jared Ramsey, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
