By Staff
Athletic Management, 18.2, February/March 2006, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/am/am1802/wudivisions.htm
At Lebanon (Ore.) High School, the changes are being applauded. At South Eugene (Ore.) High School, administrators are shaking their heads. Both reactions are to how their state association has reclassified their schools.
Starting in 2006-07, the Oregon School Activities Association (OSAA) will move from four to six classifications to improve competitive equity. Many small rural schools are pleased, since they feel the changes will help avoid the mismatches they were experiencing. But some larger urban schools are less enthusiastic—they’re being handed lengthy travel schedules they’ve never had before, occasionally with destinations that lie over wintry mountain passes.
The OSAA’s constitution requires the association to examine its enrollment-based classification and league alignments every four years. Usually only minor tweaks are made, but this past fall, the OSAA felt larger changes were needed.
The revamping process took 13 months, in which time a special committee was formed and reams of data were analyzed. Mike Wallmark, Assistant Executive Director of the OSAA, says that competitive equity tied to enrollment was the factor given the highest priority by the committee.
"The largest schools in some of our classifications were two-and-a-half times the size of the smallest schools, and some people questioned whether that allowed reasonable competition," Wallmark says. "We also had twice as many schools in the 4-A classification as we did in 3-A, which made it hard to create leagues with reasonable travel. We didn’t want very few schools competing for a state championship in 3-A compared to the other classifications.
"But analyzing these problems was only a starting point," he continues. "The committee also looked at financial impact, the effect on missed class time, as well as on travel of individual schools and leagues, and the impact on our association, since it basically means two more levels of state championship events."
The major question came down to weighing improved competitive equity against longer travel times for some urban schools. Ken Ray, Principal and Athletic Director at 1,300-student Lebanon High, says the changes are positive for his school because they both reduce travel time and allow teams to compete with schools more like theirs. At the northern end of its old league, Lebanon had bus rides of up to four hours, Ray says, while next year it will enter a league with nearby schools, most of which, like Lebanon, are the only high school in their town.
"Our old league included towns with multiple high schools, and it was easy for parents to move kids across town to make teams," Ray says. "Nobody’s going to move to Lebanon, Ore., so their kid can play football, but they may move to Eugene or Salem or Portland to get their kid on a competitive team. In the league we’re moving to, there are only one or two schools in each town. Competitively, that’s better for us."
But Dave Hancock, Athletic Director at South Eugene, has found his school on the losing side of the equation. South Eugene will remain in the OSAA’s largest class, 6-A, and will go from playing mostly metro-area rivals to some far-away schools in southern Oregon. "Most of our travel has been to schools no more than 10 or 12 miles away," he says. "Now our closest rival is still in town, but after that we travel to schools between an hour and three hours away."
Not only will travel costs increase significantly, but there will be more lost class time as athletes will need to leave school earlier for away games. "And it’s not just varsity," Hancock says. "It’s freshman and j.v. teams, too. Another problem is that it will be hard for parents to leave work and get to the games to see their children participate. We might play more Saturday games so parents can have a better chance at seeing their kids play."
Hancock says he appreciates the travel rural-area schools have long faced, but asks, why spread the misery unnecessarily? "We who choose to live in a city don’t have some of the advantages smaller places have," he says. "But we choose it specifically because we can live near where we work and we don’t have to travel far to see our kids play."
Hancock also wonders whether the problem with competitive equity was really limited to the smaller schools, and he believes it should have been examined more closely. "Is the parity problem only among schools with medium or below-average enrollment, say among schools of 350 and 900 students?" Hancock asks. "If that is a problem, then it needs to be addressed, mainly for safety reasons in sports like football. But is it a problem across the board? We have an enrollment of about 1,700. This year we lost in the second round of the state football playoffs to a school of approximately 1,180."
Pat Latimer, District Athletic Director for the four-high-school Eugene district, commends the OSAA for its process, which he says was fair, thorough, and open. But, in retrospect, he wishes the large-school athletic administrators had made their voices louder.
At one point early on, there was a suggestion to go to six classes only for football and five classes for all other sports, which Latimer felt was a good plan. But as higher-level administrators started to join the debate, they strongly argued for the move to six classes for all sports.
"I thought the athletic directors had done a good job with the plan to make a fifth class with two parts, but school administrators said, ‘Let’s do it for all sports,’" Latimer says. "We’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves."
In Lebanon, Ray understands that some schools are now in the same leaky travel boat his school had long occupied. But he also says there was no way the OSAA could please everyone, and he believes the association sought to do the most overall good. His advice to athletic directors is to make sure state or league decision-makers hear their concerns as they try to balance conflicting needs. "Once they get enough complaints or hear from enough people who have concerns, that’s when they take a look at things," he says. "That’s why they made a change in Oregon."