The stupidest thing your state high school association allows to happen

The Dispatch did a poll a few years ago and a good majority of players and coaches wanted the football title games at Ohio State. Getting to play at a place that is the mecca of Ohio sports would be a dream for kids. It also looks down where there is 6,000 people in a 20,000 seat stadium. At least you have the Ohio Stadium experience.

 

STILL the way it's set up for hoops.

 

Lucky.

We end up with three days of hell where every single school (boys and girls) are playing in tournaments. If the calendar falls right, the final games end up on New Year's Eve.

But basketball season in Texas is pretty much six weeks anyway, considering how long football lasts.

 

They need a fifth division, Slap. Bottom line.

I went to East Kentwood last year for a track meet. The place was as big as Central Michigan's campus. They are three pole vault pits, an electric long jump raker, a 10 lane track - you only need 8. More importantly they had a belligerant number of kids. They operate like a small college, so it was no surprise, they won the Division 1 Meet, and also set about three state records including the 4x1 and 4x2. Meanwhile, my school which has less than half of the students struggled to get one person to the meet because of a number of reasons:
1. Talent pool isn't as big.
2. We don't have the money to pay for as money coaches and provide enough individual instruction.

I know it sounds like a complete excuse, but I could quit my day job, recruit all day, set up fundraisers and spend 80 hours a week with track related things and I would never be on par with those schools.

The divisions are just waaay too big. They would never let the talent gap be that great in football, which is why they have 8 divisions. So I don't see why it is okay for track - or cross country for that matter - which is another clusterfuck. Our team was solid in D-2, plenty of state qualifiers, and state qualifying teams. Not anymore in D-1, because we have to run against a school whose runners are trained year round by the coaches at U-M.

But I guess that's a whole different story.

 

Yes, the OSAA's six-class system has been a disaster. Historic rivalries broken up, travel costs increased, competitoon severely watered down, a virtually everybody-in playoff system.

And the OSAA doesn't use the 1.5 multiplier for private school enrollment, so some of the private schools who draw from trwo or three cities dominate the lower classifications.

 

You won't need luck for that. You just do it yourself. But the larger point is spot-on. The GHSA is notoriously unhelpful, and sometimes latently combative, to media.

 

The Journalism state finals are this weekend in Illinois. No shit.

The IHSA's biggest gaffe was class expansion, particularly in basketball, where the two-class system was sublime. And sometimes their regional seeding is a bit short-sighted. But all-in-all, they run a great tournament. There are no major flaws in set ups, and the state final facilities are all good.

Plus their website, www.ihsa.org, has all the info you'd ever want.

 

I think it has changed now, but in the early 2000s in Arizona, you could have co-state champions in soccer.

If the state title match was deadlocked after regulation and two 10-minute overtime periods, the game was called right there and both teams were declared state champs (even though every other playoff game used sudden death and/or PKs to decide a winner) ...

I covered that situation once in 2001, and it was strange for sure when the whistle blew after the second OT period and the score was still 0-0. It was completely silent for like a minute. Kids, who would be deemed co-state champs by the state, were literally crying because they felt like they lost. One team dad, trying to pump everyone up from his school, started chanting "we didn't lose! we didn't lose!" -- very weird.

I called the state athletic association about it and questioned why this rule was the way it was, and the director at the time said basically that no one had ever challenged it, so it remained... Like I said, I think it has changed now, though...

A few other interesting items:
• In North Carolina, you have four classifications for all sports, except football, where you have eight. Basically each classification is divided in half, based on enrollment, so you have "Small 1A" and "Big 1A," etc. In some cases, schools don't know if they are going to go big or small until the final week or two of the regular season. Of course, you have conspiracy theories of schools fudging numbers so they can play "down" and help their own playoff cause

• For a couple of years, in this one conference I covered in North Carolina, the No. 5 team had an easier draw than the No. 4 team in baseball and softball playoffs. In the opening round, the No. 5 played a No. 3 from another conference, while the No. 4 faced a conference champion (which 99 percent of the time was a much better opponent). I called the state about that, and they basically said, "Hmm, that is interesting" but never did anything to change it.

• North Carolina allows charter and private schools to join its "public" conferences, so at the smaller school ranks (1A and 2A) you usually have private and charter schools from big cities like Raleigh, Charlotte, etc. dominating sports like volleyball, cross country, tennis, soccer, etc. While not always the case, the rural schools have a hard time competing against a big-city private school with a much broader base of athletes to draw from...

 

Have to say, reading this thread makes me feel much better about my state.

 

But now there are other outrageously nice 20 to 30K seat stadiums in the state. One region should no longer have a monopoly on it. I do agree though that Ohio Stadium just doesn't work.

 

Reminds me of a cross country runner from one of our local schools a couple years back. A kid from the country, he was so used to running around the neighborhood barefoot that that was how he ran his races. I think the rule was, he had to start the race with shoes but was allowed to finish without them. So he'd kick them off as soon as he crossed the starting line.
He was pretty good, too. IIRC, he finished in the top 15 or 20 in the largest classification in the state.

 

Given the weather forecast for the next few days, that extra week might turn out to be a blessing. There's going to be a lot of first-round series that get delayed, and I have a feeling they're going to have to shuffle the schedule a bit.
Let's just hope they finish the finals before we have to get cracking on the football tab.