Steve Christilaw: WIAA considers new classification formula

Raising a child is expensive.

But raising an athlete?

Yes, it takes a tremendous investment of hard work, time and talent. Huge amounts of dedication and commitment, too.

It also takes even more of an investment in Benjamins.

And today, we’re all about the Benjamins.

It’s a common-enough saying – to be a successful athlete you have to be willing to pay the price for greatness.

Trouble is, you also have to pay the price, period.

The Washington Interscholastic Activities Association is poised to address the growing reality that, in addition to “sweat equity,” athletes’ families, and school, must be able to pay the price.

The cost cuts both ways.

For parents, it’s not just the participation fees and the cost of a new pair of shoes (Whatever happened to those canvas Chuck Taylor All-Stars?). There’s the cost of private lessons, summer camps, summer leagues, club teams, traveling teams, not to mention the tanks of gas shuttling kids back and forth to practice, games and road trips.

And that doesn’t begin to cover the time investment some working families just cannot afford.

To play high school varsity soccer in the Greater Spokane area, the common wisdom is that you must play club soccer. It’s the same with volleyball, basketball and baseball. OK, pretty much any team sport.

That fact alone, more than any other, is why you see so few three-sport athletes. You’d need two clones and a 36-hour day to do all that for three high school varsity sports.

It’s costly, too, for a school, fielding a full slate of teams. Varsity and junior varsity programs are standard. But having a C squad and a freshman team? Financially that can be a luxury, but it’s one that winning programs have in order to fully develop quality athletes.

It costs for a program to seek out the best competition. Travel expenses aren’t cheap, especially when it involves an overnight trip across the state.

And that’s not counting the investment necessary for uniforms, up-to-date equipment and well-maintained facilities.

In the two top classifications, Class 4A and 3A, the schools that have won the most state championships, according to reporting in the Seattle Times, are Mercer Island, Bellevue and Skyline high schools. The newspaper also points out that fully 25 percent of all state titles are won by private schools, despite the fact that private schools enroll just over 7 percent of all students in the state.

Here’s the difference between the state’s haves and have-nots.

O’Dea High School is a private school on Seattle’s First Hill. The Fighting Irish have won four state Class 3A baseball titles since 2004.

O’Dea has a booster club that funded equipment that turns the school gym into an indoor baseball facility. It has roll-out turf, batting cages and a portable pitching mound.

When everyone else is fielding tennis balls off a varnished gym floor, O’Dea is fielding baseballs off its own practice turf.

Just down the road in Seattle, Rainier Beach struggles to compete in the same league, but not just without a booster club, but with no athletics budget to speak of at all. High on the list of every coach’s to-do list is fundraising. Not for roll-out turf, but for luxuries like, well, paying an assistant coach.

The state’s high school sports governing body will meet Monday to discuss and vote on proposed amendments to its operating charter.

Among them are two measures that directly address the classification process: the formula that sorts schools into Class 4A, 3A, 2A, etc.

The state uses hard enrollment numbers to sort schools evenly into six divisions, with a goal of having 64 schools in each classification. An element of chaos is introduced by allowing schools to “opt up.” A Class 2A school, for example, can choose to move up a class to play in a Class 3A league. But to maintain the proper percentage, the Class 3A school with the smallest enrollment then gets pushed down to Class 2A.

One amendment would take the process back to simply using the hard numbers. Schools with enrollment of 1,300 students or more go to Class 4A. Class 3A schools will have 900-1,299, 2A 450-899, 1A 225-449, 2B 105-224, and 1B 104 and below.

Schools can still opt up, but schools on the cusp will no longer be pushed down to maintain balance.

That will likely create an imbalance in the size of each classifications. The WIAA Executive Board will then explore changing the size of state tournaments based on the size of the classification. Instead of a 16-team state tournament, the Class 4A tournament could go to a 24-team tournament. Smaller classifications could go to an eight-team tournament.

But perhaps the biggest proposed change to the way the state classifies schools comes in an amendment to modify those classifications based on socioeconomic factors – specifically the number of free and reduced lunches a school issues.

It’s a system Minnesota, Ohio and Oregon use, and it seems to work.

“The gap between the haves and have-nots is getting wider,” WIAA assistant executive director John Miller told the Seattle Times. “It gets to the point where it’s impossible to rebound because you just can’t win.”

The average Washington high school offers free or reduced-cost lunches to 43 percent of its students. If a school has at least 10 percent higher than that, it would reduce its enrollment number by that percentage.

Rainier Beach, to continue the example, issues 69.8 percent of its students free or reduced-cost lunches. Under the proposal, it would then reduce its enrollment total by 23 percent.

It’s a real-world attempt to maintain competitive balance in high school sports starting in the 2020-2021 high school sports season.

Now it’s up to the WIAA’s Representative Assembly, a 53-person board primarily made up of mostly directors from across the state who will vote on the proposed amendment during its meeting in Renton.

We’ll know more next week.