Class 4A Needs to Change (Part 1 of 2)

Originally Posted Friday, October 23, 2009

    I guess I ruffled some feathers, (or some other sort of cliché) with our brethren to the south with some of my comments following the Paola/Osawatomie game last Friday night.

    First, let me say, if I offended, by saying the truth, then there’s not much I can say. If I offended by the way I stated the truth, then I am sorry, and I should have been better at saying what I said.

    The truth about what happened at Paola last week is, the Trojans came into the game with an undefeated record, and ranked fifth in the state and got beat, plain and simple. No one got lucky, there wasn’t a bad bounce of the ball, or a touchdown called back on a phantom holding penalty, or any one or a thousand different circumstances that could cause one team to win and the other to feel cheated. None of that happened. The Panthers and Trojans lined up and the Panthers were the best, plain and simple, end of discussion.

    How the two teams arrived at this point in the road is open for discussion though. I had a nice conversation with Osawatomie High School Principal Doug Chisam today, and I must say, he makes some valid points.

    Now, Doug and I go way back, and we’ve know each other for a long time, and we’ve had plenty of discussions about a wide range of topics. He called me to give me the Osawatomie side of the argument, mainly to do with why the Trojans left the Frontier League and why they have lobbied to be removed from their current district assignment with Paola and Louisburg.

    What it all boils down to is this, and it’s not a Paola vs. Osawatomie thing. It doesn’t go all the way back to the civil war days. It’s not any of those old Paola vs Osawatomie, bad blood things. No, at least for football in this day and age, those hard feelings are gone. I guess it’s only guys like me, like I said, I NEVER beat the Trojans at football, and registered only a couple of wins in basketball in my high school career. To me Paola vs. Osawatomie is a BIG deal. But I guess I’m just living in the past, ‘cause to todays generation it’s not. 

    No, ask a Paola kid who their biggest rival is today and they’d probably tell you  Louisburg, at least in football. Ask an Osawatomie kid and they’d tell you Anderson County, or maybe even Central Heights.

    Why, you ask, it’s not because we’re all over all those things that made us rivals in the past, no, it’s because we’ve outgrown each other. An herein lies the root of the problem, Kansas Class 4A is too big for it’s own good.

    Now the class is no bigger than any other, but the problem lies, not in the number of schools (64) but the disparity of enrollment of the schools (532-199). This is where the ultimate problem lies, and there’s no easy way  to fix it. But all one has to do is look at the next two smallest classes to see why the Trojans (and a whole bunch of other schools) find it so difficult to compete on a game to game basis in many of the leagues and districts around the state. In Class 3A there’s the same number of schools (64) but the enrollment between the largest school (198) and the smallest (122) is only 76 students, a far cry from the 316 from top to bottom in 4A! The enrollment gap in 2A is even smaller (119-75) or 44 students.

    When one looks at the pecking order in the class, you can see why the Trojans (and many other schools) have such a difficult time. Paola is the sixth largest school in the class with 492 students in grades 10-12. Louisburg sits closer to the middle (approximately 29th) with 378. Osawatomie is also near the middle, (approximately 38th) but nearly 100 students LESS than Louisburg at 275 and over 200 LESS than Paola.

    So the real problem lies with the 4A Classification. There’s too big of a range of students from top to bottom, and it’s always going to be that way because of the way the state divides its schools. The top 32 schools in enrollment comprise class 6A, the next 64 are 5A, then 4A and on down the line, with the remaining 100 or so schools that play 8 man football. The big schools can hold their own against each other, and the small schools are grouped tightly together in enrollment. It’s the 4A class, the middle class if you will that struggles.

    In part 2, I’ll suggest one way Class 4A could be changed to make things easier on the “small schools”.