A BASKETBALL SCANDAL IN HIGH SCHOOL. I took some joy in the recent resurgence of Milwaukee Hamilton's basketball program, tempered by displeasure with what high school basketball has become.

Years ago, Milwaukee Hamilton's boys' basketball team won a state championship (keep scrolling) with students from the neighborhood. In the early 1990s, two different teams made it to Madison but did not advance to the title game.

Now comes something close to a recruiting scandal. The man who coached a northwest side school, Milwaukee Vincent, to five victories in seven appearances in the finals, lives near Hamilton. He recently became the head basketball coach there, in part because of illiquidity in the housing market and high fuel prices.

Milwaukee families have some choice in the schools their children attend, and sometimes that choice depends on athletic opportunities.

I'm more displeased and less temperate to learn that Hamilton must forfeit its share of the 2008-09 City championship for a different roster error, involving a fifth-semester sophomore.

The Wildcats' share of the City title was taken away Monday. Milwaukee Public Schools commissioner of athletics Bill Molbeck announced that Hamilton had been forced to forfeit seven City Conference victories and two nonconference victories.

The forfeits changed Hamilton's 12-1 conference record to 5-8 and turned its 19-4 overall record into a 10-13 season. As a result, Washington (12-1) is the sole City champion for 2008-'09.

Oddly enough, Hamilton's coaching change and the influx of transfers that made Hamilton the area's most controversial program last season didn't play any role in the forfeit ruling. Instead, the source of the trouble turned out to be a player who had already been there.

A junior basketball player had started attending Hamilton during the 2007-'08 school year, so administrators were used to seeing him around. But even though he was a sophomore at the time, he had already attended four semesters at other schools, pushing him past the WIAA threshold for instant-transfer eligibility.

By rule, the player was supposed to sit out of varsity athletics for one calendar year. But Hamilton administrators didn't immediately notice this anomaly and allowed him to play this season. He was a little-used backup who averaged fewer than 3 points per game.

The news story includes editorial comment.

So the Wildcats' season ended as messily as it began, with Tom Diener - the legendary Milwaukee Vincent coach - taking over after leaving Vincent, then taking the job at Grafton and then backing out of it, saying at the time that he wouldn't coach in 2008-'09.

And then came all the transfers - most of them sophomores, and most from Bay View - which prompted an internal MPS investigation that cleared the players of wrongdoing.

There are purists inside and outside the City Conference who see Hamilton as a renegade program that has pushed the envelope of the rule book to its limit.

Behavior like that, unfortunately, has become a growing trend - mostly in our area, but in some points elsewhere - by shortsighted adults who view basketball as the most important factor in an adolescent's life.

These kids, who think they're lucky, are instead being turned into pieces of meat up for barter and bid at age 13.

Given the propensity of big-city high schools, including Hamilton, to turn into dropout factories, the kids' preferences for shooting threes might be rational, and the adults not so short-sighted (although the odds of a high-school basketball player signing a professional contract are well south of the longest shot at the Kentucky Derby). But there still is a planetarium at Hamilton. Perhaps a restoration of the school's academic side, to go with the sports emphasis, will help reverse the trend.