It’s Time For High School Athletics To Adopt Promotion And Relegation

Back in 2016, toward the tail end of Spor Repor’s prior iteration as a Pacific Northwest comedic sports news site, I submitted a proposal to the Oregon School Activities Association after opening their 2018–2022 classification alignment cycle for public comment.

Spoiler Alert: They didn’t accept my proposal.

The major crux of the proposal was a reduction of 6 classifications to 4 classifications and the implementation of promotion and relegation on a team-by-team, not school-by-school, basis going forward.

For those who’d like to waste some time and read some outdated thoughts on Oregon high school conference alignment, OSAA still has the document posted on their site.

The reason I’m bringing this up, out of the blue, was a tweet posted by the Dallas Morning News. The tweet, and accompanying article, outlined extreme disparity in Dallas area high school football scores; just in a single week.

Now, for those who aren’t familiar with the sport of football, scores like 52–0 and 84–0 are not common occurrences. You will see scores in this range a few times each college football season due to the financial and scholarship disparity between FBS and FCS teams in one-off non-conference games that, for the most part, are treated like pre-season friendlies.

In high school athletics, there does exist disparity between schools with regards to booster club support and school district funding. However, given the nature of high school athletics as a “for the love of the game” endeavor, a 63–0 scoreline is more a magnifying glass on the systemic disadvantages that certain schools and school districts face rather than a success story for a very skilled team.

Football isn’t international soccer. Point differential does not factor into the standings for football. There is no difference between a 35–0 and 70–0 scoreline other than extra salt to rub into the wound.

The reason I believe high school athletic associations, such as the UIL in this instance, should explore the implementation of promotion and relegation, either in conjunction with their annual classification realignment cycle or as a replacement of it, is the fact that not all teams are created equal.

Having been a soccer referee since high school, I’ve seen first-hand over the years what happens to programs which find themselves as the doormat of their conference or league: it becomes perpetual. Rather than recruiting kids to try out for the team “for the love of the sport”, kids are being recruited to a team knowing full-well they might get one win that season.

That defeatist attitude becomes toxic and damages teams, especially in sports that are less-appealing to the local population of students. In an era where high school students have limitless opportunities to spend their time outside of school hours, it’s a completely unnecessary barrier of entry for schools to erect on themselves and does nothing to improve the program.

As someone who attended an inner city high school, I can attest that golf had the least amount of interest among students; being buoyed by students who lived on the more affluent outskirts of our school’s enrollment map. Meanwhile, our cross-county programs were regarded as the best in the state; regardless of classification.

Should the success of our cross-country programs come at the expense of our poor-performing golf programs when it comes to classification alignment and vice versa? No.

Knowing that the four-year enrollment cycle of high school students leads to talent drop-offs, there are simple and straight-forward measures to put into place in order to limit promotion and relegation. As I mentioned in my OSAA proposal, promotion and relegation could be limited to just one classification.

For example, Cottage Grove High School would be initially classified as a 3A school under my OSAA proposal based on their enrollment. However, let’s just say Cottage Grove have a stellar football program that even went to the state finals in their second year of being in 3A. On the flip side, their baseball program has only won one conference in two years as a 3A program. After that second year, Cottage Grove would have their football program reclassified as a 4A team and their baseball team would be reclassified as a 2A team. Even if the Cottage Grove baseball program were still as unsuccessful as a 2A side, it would not be reclassified as a 1A team.

The reason for a two-year promotion and relegation cycle is two fold. Most non-conference high school games are scheduled as home-and-home contracts over the course of back-to-back seasons. Not only does this keep longstanding scheduling practices intact, it also eliminates the chance for schools to be penalized with relegation based on a single fluke season.

Travel concerns are one of the biggest concerns when it comes to classification. Outside of major metro areas, the difference between playing in one classification and another could be the difference of an extra dozen hours worth of travel time over the course of a single season.

Competing in, at the time, one of the two Eastern Washington leagues that are a part of Washington’s highest classification, there were multiple instances where I had to travel over two hours for a conference match each season. For teams who had non-conference games in Seattle or Spokane or Vancouver, that’s at least three hours of travel oneway.

Part of the reason I opted to eliminate two OSAA classifications was to help alleviate this issue. The more schools you have in a single classification, the more opportunity you have to create a realigned conference that doesn’t have any extreme travel anomalies. Regarding the Cottage Grove example, a move to 4A would actually improve their overall travel time thanks to the nearby Eugene metro area. Meanwhile, a move down to 2A would be negligible in terms of travel with four 2A schools actually being closer to them than their nearest 3A rival.

Not all schools would face these negligible travel impacts. One look at the eastern rural half of Oregon shows a very spread out map. In fact, the enrollment disparity is so big that since the publication of this proposal, Hermistion has left the OSAA in favor of joining Washington’s WIAA in order to compete against nearby Tri-Cities schools of the same size. Hermiston, however, is an extreme outlier.

Enrollment should no longer be seen as this definite criteria that aligns schools into their classification and, guess what, there is already precedent for this. Across the country, private schools with smaller programs are allowed to compete above their enrollment classification because of well-documented and perpetual differences in both the recruitment of students to the school and accessible resources for the athletic department; all of which has led to overt success against public schools of similar size. In fact, there are parts of the country that have public and private schools complete in separate conferences because of these inherent competitive advantages.

All it takes is one extra step with this philosophy, to extend these classification waivers to a team-by-team basis, and another, to invoke these waivers automatically for over-performing and under-performing teams, and you’ve got yourself promotion and relegation. It’s that simple.