If we are either providing or consuming the contents of this page, probably we are emotionally invested in high school sports. With that investment comes the likelihood that our judgment gets cloudy from time to time. We lose sight of the reasons these games exist.
It’s a short list, really: to teach the value of health in body and mind; to impress the importance of winning and losing with dignity; and to ensure that those benefits are available to as many students as possible. That’s it. I respectfully submit that almost any other element is merely a sub-category under one of those umbrellas.
Being a staunch proponent of these activities and a forever fan of the Maine schools that pursue them, I watched this week’s two-year realignment proposal by the Maine Principals’ Association football committee with interest from afar.
The typical, visceral reaction is resistance. Admittedly I’ve never been one to embrace change without a fight, but I encourage everyone with a passion for high school football to err on the side of acceptance and give the five-class system a chance.
I realize this position doesn’t peacefully co-exist with the old-school, no-guts-no-glory philosophy that often rules the gridiron. Already, we’ve done the math — 75 to 80 teams, divided into fifths — and come to the knee-jerk conclusion that the 2017-18 classification cycle is just another brick in the “everybody gets a trophy” wall.
That isn’t the motivation of this reshuffling at all. It might be an unintended consequence, but you’ll just have to trust me on this one: Nobody is waving an MPA banner and thinking, “Hmm, how can we water down the current system to increase our trophy bill and make more people happy?”
These issues are universal. Here in Kentucky there are about 200 varsity programs, split evenly as possible into six classes, 1A to 6A. That’s up from four divisions not more than a decade ago, fostering the same chatter about making state titles “less meaningful.” Yet even with six columns, winning a 2017 championship in Kentucky will be twice as hard as winning one in Maine, if you go strictly by what the calculator says.
We all know Maine is a different animal. Heck, the natives and the lifers wear that uniqueness on their sleeves or tattooed across their foreheads. But then the MPA tries to add a class in basketball or two classes in football and suddenly we take it as an affront to our toughness or our rugged individualism.
Governing sports in Maine is a thankless and sometimes impossible job right now. There are geographic and socioeconomic challenges faced by few other states. To wit, if your school has more than 1,000 students or fewer than 350 students and it has a football team, you are a statistical outlier. It is virtually impossible for the MPA to put you in a division that furnishes you a full schedule against teams your own size and not saddle you with an enormous travel burden.
Also, if Maine is a horse of a different color, football even more aptly fits that description. It isn’t basketball, in which you can win with five, or baseball, where you may survive with nine. The need for depth and the vast difference in physical maturity between freshmen boys and senior men demand a minimum roster of 20 to 25 for safety’s sake.
This state of being has absolutely zero to do with enrollment. Some “Class D” schools wield twice that many prospects. A few “Class A” coaches couldn’t drum up that much participation if they were allowed to pay the kids.
Working around these issues requires outside-the-box alertness. The proposed Class E, non-championship, developmental division is just that. I hope more teams will join it than the six or seven currently expected to participate. Swallow pride now in return for the benefits later, not the least of which is the mere survival of your program. Who cares that there’s no Gold Ball? You aren’t winning one in A, B, C or D anytime soon.
I also hope more schools will follow MPA Assistant Director Mike Burnham’s suggestion to play outside conference and class. Those traditional distinctions are absolutely killing competitive balance in all Maine sports. Good teams should be encouraged to play other good teams and struggling programs permitted to battle other struggling programs, regardless of numbers or location.
That’s how Kentucky does it, and I presume it is how many other states with a serviceable interstate highway system do it. Play three or four local rivals within a “district,” then set your own remaining schedule for the two-year cycle.
If everybody has to make the playoffs to account for the lack of schedule uniformity, it’s a small price to pay, and it isn’t because our kids are “soft” or “snowflakes.”
Quite the opposite. I want more of them playing the rough, tough game of football, so they can benefit from all the life lessons it conveys. I promise you that’s what the MPA wants, too.
Kalle Oakes is a 27-year veteran of the Sun Journal sports department and the Maine high school football beat. He is sports editor of the Georgetown (Kentucky) News-Graphic. He can be contacted by email at kaloakes1972@yahoo.com.
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