WIAA meetings offer more than meets the aye

When I was a kid, my dad was a member of our small town’s Parks and Recreation Commission. Every once in a while he would drag me – and, if you know my dad, you know I mean that literally – to its meetings.

Talk about exciting times for an 11-year-old fidget.

So when I spent two fun-filled days at the recent WIAA Executive Board meetings earlier this week, the flashbacks were as intense as Jerry Garcia’s – and not nearly as fun.

But, like those meetings of old, I learned something.

Unlike when I was a sixth-grader (when no one listened to me), I can share what I learned. In the grand journalism tradition of parachuting into a battle zone and telling everybody how to run their troops, here is my take:

•The board members take their responsibilities seriously.

They deliberate, they discuss options, they don’t rush into decisions. That’s one reason we won’t know which B basketball tournament will be in Spokane in 2007. Or even if there will be a tournament in Spokane in 2007.

Now that I have your attention, I’m 99 percent sure one of the two B tournaments will be here, although there was a sentiment expressed by the West Side districts to at least examine having them both on their side of the mountains.

But don’t expect that to fly.

What you should expect is the Spokane Regional Sports Commission will bid for at least one of the B tournaments in January. It would have bid for both, but a plan to partner with Gonzaga to use the McCarthey Arena and Martin Centre fell through recently, and with it the chance of two tournaments

So the SRSC still isn’t sure which of the tournaments to bid on.

But the choice is simple.

After looking at the WIAA’s preliminary breakdown of schools by classification, there are many more 1B schools in the Spokane area than there are 2B schools.

How many more? 13 of the 2B’s 61 schools are in districts 7 or 9, the two small-school WIAA districts in far Eastern Washington. That’s 21.3 percent of the classification’s schools. Sure, it includes such B Tournament stalwarts as Reardan, Republic, Davenport and St. George’s, but there just isn’t as many as the 1B ranks.

The smallest classification included 24 schools (or 39.3 percent of its 61) from the two districts. Included in that number are such traditional B schools as Tekoa-Oakesdale, Garfield-Palouse, Sprague-Harrington, St. John-Endicott and last year’s girls champion, Cusick.

Plus, Spokane has a half-century tradition of hosting the state basketball tournament with the smallest schools. Let’s keep it that way.

•The WIAA board needs to diversify.

It needs to add a student component.

The Executive Board oversees prep athletics in this state and prep athletics are made up of … preps. But the board has none, not even in an observer capacity. There are officials, there are school board members, there are coaches, but no students.

How about a male and female athlete representative on the board? Or a student representative spot that rotates through the state’s eight districts? Or a student from Western Washington and Eastern Washington?

The time would be intense, but the education immense. That’s what high school is about.

•The Executive Board and WIAA staff spent innumerable hours on the new classification numbers, figuring out the enrollments, agreeing on a percentage formula, dividing the schools into six groups, with a nearly equal number of schools in each classification (64 or 65 in the top four, 61 in each of the Bs).

Now schools will “opt-up,” or choose to play in a classification above their own.

The reasons for doing this are varied, but range from wanting to play at the highest level of competition to wanting to preserve long-time rivalries.

When all is said and done, as many as 10 schools may opt to 4A, and another half-dozen to 3A. So all the work the WIAA did to even out the classifications will be damaged, if not ruined.

There’s an easy fix: Don’t let public schools opt-up. I recognize it would be almost impossible not to allow private schools to move up a class or two – they do have built-in advantages – but there should be no reason to allow a public school to move classes.

Old leagues won’t be ruined, as long as everyone is willing to bend a little and follow the GSL model and be willing to have leagues with mixed classifications.

The naysayers are wrong. It can work.

When my dad was chairman of our town’s Parks and Recreation Commission, he thought it would be a good idea to preserve the mountain wilderness north of town.

But everyone said it was impossible for a city to have its own wilderness area. Sitting at those board meeting, I learned that wasn’t true. Not if you’re willing to find ways to make it work.

Dad was, and our town was one of the first in the country to have a designated wilderness.