I was once told that if I was going to steal somebody's ideas, I should at least steal good ideas. Alright...here goes.
Right now, the South Carolina High School League is considering plans for realignment, an every-other-year process of dividing schools up into athletic regions based on enrollment size and proximity. It's always difficult coming up with regions, since you have to make an attempt to preserve rivalries and try not to screw anybody over with obscenely long road trips. It's going to be even more difficult this year, since the legislative body of the league voted earlier this year to scrap the decades-old four classification system. The body supported going to either five or six and the executive committee ultimately endorsed having five. One of the reasons for the move was that the discrepancy in each class between the big and small has gotten wider. Schools with more students have more athletes and tend to be more successful just on raw numbers. For example, right now, Wando, with its 4,000-plus students, has almost three times the number of students as some other AAAA schools. Class A schools wanted the move because their ranks have become overpopulated with private and charter schools, which have a bevy of built-in advantages and have become dominant in most sports. Everyone also seems to agree that it is kind of goofy for our state to crown seven football champions (Class A, AA and AAAA all have split champions) which is almost as many as Florida, which last time I checked in much bigger than our state in terms of population, land mass, number of high schools and retirees, Tge returees thing isn't really relavant, but I strive to be through. It is at the sole discretion of Jerome Singleton, league executive director, and his staff how the new classes will look. Unlike past years, there is not an anticipation that classes will all be equal in number. If the most functional system involves one class being bigger than the others, then so be it. Schools are submitting ideas to Singleton and I've informally polled local coaches and athletic directors about what they hope to see. Chester High football coach Victor Floyd said he favors scrapping the current system, which has the biggest 52 schools in terms of enrollment numbers competing in AAAA, the next biggest 52 in AAA, the next largest 52 playing in AA and everyone left (51 schools) competing in Class A. Floyd said his preference is to go back to the old way of doing things, which is to set hard numbers for each classification. He set some parameters in terms of numbers and said the members per class would be pretty close to even. As we spread out basically the same number of teams among an increased number of classes, travel and geography are going to be difficult to rectify. Some regions will be far-reaching and far-flung, that seems unavoidable, especially in Class A schools which have largely disappeared in the upperstate. The trend, though, is toward competitive balance and away from proximity where drawing up regions and classes are concerned. So, basically even numbers are about the best we can hope for, but Floyd's plan has some other merits as well. I may be off slightly, but I think the numbers Floyd recited were 1,600 students and over for the new AAAAA class, 1,000-1,599 would be AAAA, 700-999 would comprise AAA, schools with between 400 and 699 students would make up AA and 399 and under would fall in Class A. According to the latest 135-day enrollment numbers, that would give us 43 schools in AAAAA, with Wando's 4,065 on the high end and Lugoff-Elgin's 1,614 on the low side. AAAA would have 44 schools, with Colleton County's 1,592 as the biggest and Brookland-Cayce's 1,002 as the smallest. AAA would have 41 schools including Palmetto on the high end with 985 and Bishop England on the low at 710. AA would have 40 schools, with Keenan's 698 at the top and Carver's Bay's 408 at the bottom. Class A would have 45 schools. The biggest would be Gray Collegiate Academy at roughly 370 students and the tiniest being something called High Point Academy High School with 24 students. Seriously...no idea what that is. Obviously, every school will want to argue that they are too small to compete with Wando and that any cutoff line should be just above whatever their enrollment number. Unfortunately there's nothing that can be done about that. They have 800 more students than the state's second biggest school (Dorman), they are going to have a built-in advantage and nothing is going to change that. The cutoff is going to have to fall somewhere and someone is going to be the smallest AAAAA school. Sucks to be them, but them's the berries, Broham. We can't very well ask Wando to expel a few hundred kids just to make things fair. Aside from that, I don't see much for anyone to complain about. The plan has the added benefit of moving nearly all the current Class A private and charter schools up to AA. Frankly, Class A schools are the smallest and poorest in the state and don't have the means to compete with most privates and charters, which can draw from anywhere (public schools have fixed attendance lines), can decide how many students they want to have and generally have more resources at their disposal. Having them be among the smallest AA schools will have them matched up with opponents better equipped to compete with them. By that plan, Bishop England, the only private school currently playing in the AA ranks (where they dominate many sports) would move up to AAA. Again, it will level the playing field a bit. I personally like the plan because it ensures that Lewisville, one of the teams in my coverage area, will stay in the Class A ranks. Some ideas pitched would set the cutoff for Class A at 350 students. Lewisville has 365, so such a plan would make them among the smallest AA teams, would have them competing against a lot of schools that are twice their size and put them in the same class as all the current private Class A powerhouses. It would also separate them from in-county rival Great Falls. Frankly, setting the bar at 350 would make for too small a classification, particularly come football season, since several small schools (charters mainly) don't field football teams. We should know in a few months what realignment will look like. I hope that, like me, the league will steal this good idea. Like this plan? Hate it? Have a better one? Leave a comment.
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November 2021
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