AIA appeals a winning proposition

1 comment:

• Jmcguire posted at 7:38 pm on Tue, Oct 2, 2012.

  Posts: 5

  Mark, while the chance to appeal may bring hope to some programs, including Westwoods, the AIA has simply avoided the tougher, and more needed reform, of looking in total at what makes schools competitive in the first place. Rather than putting the burden on schools (read coaches and AD's) to petition down, the entire high school sports landscape would be better off with a system of Division assignment that actually makes some effort to form competitive Divisions and Sections in the first instance. For example, the entire underlying philosophy of Division assignment is based on enrollment ONLY. The premise here is that athletes are equally distributed among the population. Therefore, equal enrollments should produce approximately the same number of athletes per school. However, in the age of open enrollment and lax transfer and recruitment enforecement, if 5-10 students move from one school boundary to another, in Division 1 football that is tantamount to having 250-500 fewer enrolled students. The AIA clearly recognizes at least some of the factors that are relevant to competitive strength in the appeals factors. THey simply don't have the fortitude yet to tackle the much larger issue of really trying to achieve competitive balance. For example, by looking at last year's Division 1 football stats and comparing enrollment, roster size, and number of kids on free and reduced lunch at each Division 1 school, that enrollment appears the least correlated with winning. Roster size and socioeconomics are much more closely correlated.

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