PLAYER OF THE WEEK
January 21, 2016
TALK ON THE STREET
January 27, 2016
Louisiana principals will vote in eight days to decide the future of prep athletics in the state.
With the big day quickly approaching, there seems to be little-to-no clarity regarding which proposal will pass and become law regarding how to separate the state’s teams.
Principals, athletic directors and coaches voiced their concerns to Louisiana High School Athletic Association officials on Thursday morning at the LHSAA’s offices in Baton Rouge – the fifth of six planned area meetings in the state this week.
During the two-hour meeting, next week’s agenda items were discussed, and concerns were levied and brought against each proposal that will be voted upon next Friday in Baton Rouge.
“There is no perfect plan,” Bonine said. “All I ask is that when we have a solution, we leave the room united as one. … Whatever we decide upon, we’ll make it work. That’s my duty – to work with what we’ve got.”
There are a number of playoff segregation proposals that principals will be asked to consider. Some are new ideas, while others are foreign to our state’s history.
The proposal Bonine is backing is pushing is a rural/metropolitan split, which would be unlike anything our state has ever seen.
In this proposal, state schools would be segregated into Division I and Division II with D-I being urban schools and D-II being rural.
Urban schools would be defined as any school located within a designated distance from selected urbanized areas in our state – big-city areas with the most population density. Rural schools would be all of those outside of those metropolitan areas.
Inside both Division I and Division II would also be three, separate classifications where schools would be segregated by enrollment.
Passage of this plan would drop football state champions from nine to six in Louisiana.
Bonine said the rural/metro proposal is for football only in year one, which would allow administrators to learn the ins and outs of the format without a large-scale commitment.
“The plan is to try it and see how it works,” Louisiana High School Coaches Association (LHSCA) director Terence Williams said. “I know that it’s a controversial topic, but it’s one solution that’s on the table to be considered.”
The other possible solutions are a little more conventional. There is a proposal that would end the state’s public/private split altogether and revert high school sports to where they were before the split took place.
There’s also a proposal to take the public/private split and expand it to all sports instead of the current format now, which utilizes it just in football.
Lastly, there’s an agenda item to enact a Class 6A in Louisiana, which would feature the highest enrollment schools in the state as part of one ‘Superclass.’
Throughout the meeting, school officials poked holes into each proposal – the common theme being that there’s not enough information about the proposals to vote in a week’s time.
If officials vote against every proposal, Bonine said the LHSAA Executive Committee would have to convene to decide how to handle the 2016-17 athletic season.
“That’d be when things would get complicated,” Bonine said when asked about every proposal being rejected.
The LHSAA meetings will take place on Friday – the final day of a three-day event in Baton Rouge.
Also up for debate are official pay raises, boundary and eligibility laws, equipment changes and other minor tweaks to rules in place.
