McTournament.
Coming to a field or field house near you.
Perhaps as early as fall of 1995 if criteria established by an ad hoc committee studying state tournament structure become reality. That criteria would boost boys and girls basketball and girls volleyball from two classes to four and baseball, softball and boys and girls track from two classes to three.
A state championship is the pinnacle of high school sports, so why not let more kids scale that peak? That’s among the points we’ll be hearing at a series of town meetings the Illinois High School Association will conduct Feb. 21-March 8 to sample opinion on the possible changes.
Debate, which figures to be spirited, may boil down to what’s good for the sports versus what’s good for the kids in them.
As far as the sports themselves go, expanding classes is bad policy. Take, for example, basketball, the IHSA’s premier attraction and chief revenue source. Going to four classes would be championship by assembly line, watering down competition and interest.
By summer, practically no one would remember who the 2A champ was. Worse yet, no one would know who the state’s best team was.
Now, everyone accepts the Class AA champ as No. 1. But if a four-class system were in place now, No. 1-ranked King would be in 3A and No. 2 Joliet in 4A. Each, were it to finish its season undefeated, could lay legitimate claim to being No. 1.
Yes, football has six classes, but that’s unavoidable because the sport’s physical nature limits teams to a game a week.
The ad hoc committee’s criteria look more attractive if you concentrate on their effect on athletes. A strong basketball team from a school with 125 students would have a real shot at championship hardware, and a school with 800 students wouldn’t have to play one three times its size.
On top of that, more kids would experience the ecstasy of winning a state title.
“In football, I’ve advocated going to eight classes,” said Fremd Principal Thomas Howard, a former member of the IHSA Board of Directors. “I got chastised for that. People said, `You’re watering it down.’
“My point is, if kids are riding in a fire truck (at a title celebration), it doesn’t matter to them if there are two or three state champions. They are state champs. In Illinois, we have been too traditional for way too long.”
Not as traditional as they used to be. For years, the IHSA’s response to problems and complaints was to hunker down and ride out the storm. Under the relatively new regime of Executive Director Dave Fry, that’s no longer the case.
So after years of hearing calls for more classes, the IHSA established the ad hoc committee to examine every facet of state competition and recommend criteria for possible changes. The result (which, by the way, is not a recommendation for change but a proposal for the best way to accomplish it) is headed for the town meetings.
After that, the criteria will go one more round with the ad hoc committee and then head to the IHSA board. The board will decide what the approval process will be for any proposed changes. It could vote them in or out itself, do that after holding a non-binding referendum among member schools or conduct a binding referendum.
What emerges from the process will probably be different than what’s being discussed now. As ad hoc committee chairman and Naperville Central Athletic Director Ross Truemper rightly points out, there are significant barriers to change.
One is the IHSA’s workload. The association might need extra staff if it adds extra classes. Another barrier is that under the proposed criteria, the Public League’s basketball playoffs (as well as its playoffs in other sports) would disappear, costing the league significant revenue and its ability to crown a city champ.
These are among the reasons why after debate and tinkering and still more debate, the status may still be quo. The vote here is for exactly that.
It’s a vote no doubt tinged by a reporter’s bias. Under the new criteria, for example, we wouldn’t have had Proviso East vs. King in last March’s Class AA basketball quarterfinals, costing us a great story.
But this opinion also is colored by the notion that increasing classes puts, however unintentionally, more emphasis on winning. We already have enough of that.
High school athletics is, or should be, mainly about improvement, doing your best and learning the lessons of discipline, hard work and cooperation that sports teaches when we let it.
This seems, though, to be the era of rewards. There has to be that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow to make the journey worth pursuing.
Interestingly, increasing the number of classes would probably just increase the number of state champions, not the numbers of athletes who reach a state finals. In basketball, for instance, instead of having an Elite Eight in Champaign in two classes, we’d have a Final Four in four classes or perhaps an 8-4-4 alignment in three.
“We’re supposed to be teaching kids through athletics,” said Schaumburg girls cross-country and assistant girls track coach Jon Macnider, who attended Niles West. “Should we give everyone a trophy at the end of the season? Who do you reward and who not? Rewards have less value when everyone gets one. That’s not life.
“A coach has to see the talent he has and set a goal based on that. Not everyone gets to go to state. I didn’t get to go, and it never stopped me from competing and having fun and taking a lot away from sports.”
