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GREENSBORO — The games are easy until the adults get involved. School sports are innocent, and the kids just want to play the games and go home.

But the adults always get involved. And they always screw things up.

There might come a time in this county when we can watch our high school athletes the way we used to, enjoying their exploits not just because they wear our school colors but because we know them.

We used to know them. They grew up with our kids, went to our churches and played in the lot across the street. We knew their parents and their relatives, knew when they were out of town and when they were coming back because they told us to watch the cat and pick up the mail and gather the newspapers while they were gone.

It's not like that anymore. We don't know all the kids who wear our school colors. They don't live here anymore.

High school sports as we knew them are changing before our eyes. And it's not going to get any better, because there are too many people involved, too many moving parts, too many layers to an onion that needs to be thrown away, too many lawyers, too many coaches, too many parents willing to listen to everyone except the one who matters most.

The kid.

We're only scratching the surface of the problem here in Guilford County. The allegations of ineligible players at Northern Guilford and the acknowledged ineligible football player at Page are only the latest in a long line of allegations through the years that never got this far. That the state high school association is involved and the school system itself is involved makes it seem as if this has only been happening recently.

The fact is, this has been going on for years here and in Forsyth and Mecklenburg and Wake counties and everywhere else there are AAU programs and travel teams and club teams ultimately in competition with the high schools themselves.

How bad is it? Go to any Little League coach in this state and ask him where the best players are. They're in AAU, not Little League.

In years past, those players themselves banded together and chose their schools. It happened in golf and tennis and baseball and fast-pitch softball. The difference is that in Guilford County, some of the AAU coaches also are high school coaches. The difference is that in Guilford, there are private schools openly recruiting the same players. The difference is that in Guilford, the school system took the complaints seriously, looked into a few cases and realized how vast this problem is.

If the school system has a closed-book case against Page — and it appears that it does — then what would explain its reluctance to comment? If a school turns itself in to the high school association for using an ineligible athlete, as Page has done with a Winston-Salem football player now going to Northern, what in the world is keeping the central office from admitting it?

Could it be that this thing is just too big? Could it be that the school system wants Northern so bad that it's trying to tie Page into it?

There are two issues in play here. The first is the situation with Page and the ongoing investigation into Northern athletics. The second is what to do about it. Do we really want to go back to forcing kids to go to schools in their own attendance zones? This isn't a sports question. It's a busing question, a civil rights question, an academics question. And the answer is simple: No way.

The same thing is going on with flute players and aspiring ROTC students and early college-plan students wanting to take certain classes. We assume the system works for the whole, recognizing that some will take advantage of it. Our hopes are that those who would use the system for personal glory would be caught and exposed, and that those who continually do it will be purged.

The fact is, this is now a battle of lawyers. The fact is, the kids are once again going to lose because the grownups think high school sports are about them. They're not, and they never have been.

The problems are bigger than Northern and Page, probably bigger than the school system can handle. There are already fly-by-night "schools" and "academies" popping up right here in Guilford County, players transferring in and out with little regard for education and no ties to the community or even to fellow students. In larger cities, there are sports academies with their own admissions standards and no academic accountability.

Right here in North Carolina there are schools operating under the guise of churches, and their only purpose is to produce basketball players. Ultimately, that's what we're fighting here.

There's nothing wrong, per se, with AAU and travel programs that take only the best athletes and allow them to compete at the highest levels. There's nothing wrong, per se, with a kid wanting to get the best education or wanting to play for the best coach or music teacher in the county. But there have to be rules, and they have to be enforced.

This won't end up being a sports crisis here in Guilford County. It will end up being an academics crisis. The kids don't understand that. The grownups have to. But we don't seem to know each other anymore.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com