LHSAA will vote on one state champion per sport

By Ron Brocato, Sports
Clarion Herald

Under the delusion that it is one of the country’s premier sports bodies, the Louisiana High School Athletic Association (LHSAA) will again put forth an effort to return to the “good old days” when there was just one state championship per class, per sport, for each of its seven classes.

The sad realization is that Louisiana is hardly a big fish swimming alongside larger associations in states like Texas, Florida, California, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

The California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) is so large with so many schools that it consists of north and south sections and does not award a single state championship. But Louisiana doles out nine football “state” championships and as many as 14 in the sport of basketball.

Many of the state’s high school principals would love to see the LHSAA return to the normalcy of having one state championship per sport by doing away with select and non-select divisions and classes. And the association’s executive committee is all for it. The governing body will attempt to end split playoffs with a back-door approach when the LHSAA holds its annual meeting later in January.

A proposal to change the LHSAA constitution, authored by the executive committee, would give Select schools, which include private, parochial and some charter schools, the option to compete in the non-Select playoffs with traditional public schools, thus ending the dual-playoff system that is unfair to more than a third of the LHSAA’s members.

This is an intriguing way of returning the state playoffs to their traditional way of determining state champions. The sports that would be affected are football, boys’ and girls’ basketball, baseball and softball, all of which have been divided into Select and non-Select brackets in this weakened playoff system.

The committee reasons that this option would assure more competitive balance among schools and would give select schools the opportunity to compete against more schools in the postseason. As it now stands, the large number of public – or non-Select schools – can easily fill a 32-team playoff bracket in all classes, while Select schools are fewer in number and cannot fill a bracket without byes in early rounds.

The passage of this proposal would require a simple majority of principals attending the annual meeting (that’s 50% plus one). But don’t count on a rash of common sense overtaking the more than 300 principals on the day of the meeting. The politicking among public school principals, who placed the LHSAA in this mess back in 2013, has probably begun.

Get rid of Class 5A

A simpler and more rational solution to this madness would be to do away with Class 5A and return the LHSAA to six classes (4A through C) and just four for football (4A through 1A).

This is Louisiana, whose footprint is swallowed like a pothole in Lakeview by the larger imprints cast by Texas, California and others.

A 32-team playoff bracket is much easier to fill in four classes because the classification of schools would be adjusted by the changing enrollment numbers. Some larger schools in Class 3A would move up to 4A, and this domino effect would trickle down through each class as district designations would change.

Since 2006 and throughout the post-Katrina era, the three-parish area that comprises New Orleans proper has had just two Class 5A districts: 8-5A (Jefferson Parish public schools) and 9-5A (the Catholic League).

When Edna Karr opted to move up in class from 4A to 5A, LHSAA executive director Eddie Bonine had no recourse but to put the Algiers school in a district with the New Orleans Catholic schools.

If Class 4A were the state’s highest designation, New Orleans would have enough schools, based on the schools’ latest enrollment figures, to have three Class 4A districts, which would foster more neighborhood rivalries among students who have been friends and/or rivals since elementary school.

This is how the local map might look:

4A District 1: Edna Karr, Warren Easton, McDonogh 35, Booker T. Washington, L.B. Landry, McMain and Sophie Wright.

4A District 2: Brother Martin, Jesuit, Holy Cross, St. Augustine, Archbishop Rummel, John Curtis and Archbishop Chapelle, Dominican and Mount Carmel.

4A District 3: Bonnabel, Chalmette, East Jefferson, Grace King, John Ehret, West Jefferson and Higgins.

The map of local Class 3A districts would have a close resemblance to this:

3A District 1 (New Orleans schools): Lusher, Sci Academy (Abramson), Douglass, Kennedy, Livingston, Morris Jeff, Ben Franklin, Cabrini and Ursuline.

3A District 2 (Orleans and Jefferson combo): De La Salle, Archbishop Shaw, Belle Chasse, Helen Cox, Kenner Discovery, Riverdale, Academy of Our Lady and Academy of the Sacred Heart.

Neither large schools on the Northshore nor schools in classes lower than 3A would be affected.

This redistribution of districts in a four-class format makes too much sense to come to pass, so it may be doomed from the start.

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