Competitive balance proposal would give boost to poor districts

Under the Competitive Balance Proposal, the OHSAA would subtract 10 students (or 10 percent) from a school’s athletic count if it had 100 free-lunch participants. How much variance is there in the number of free lunch participants at area schools? For an example, here’s a look at the Greater Western Ohio Conference. The numbers are from the Ohio Department of Education and the Ohio High School Athletic Association.

About this series

Cox Media Group Ohio reporters examine the Ohio High School Athletic Association’s Competitive Balance Proposal. We take an in-depth look at the main issues surrounding a debate that could dramatically change the makeup of prep state tournaments.

Sunday: An overview on the competitive balance issue and how it came to a vote.

Monday: The boundaries issue is a point of contention among private and public schools.

Today: A look at the socioeconomic issue.

Wednesday: Many schools feel they'd be punished for winning with controversial tradition factor.

Thursday: After the vote, the next flashpoint could be inequities in Division I football.

Darnell Hoskins doesn’t want the Ohio High School Athletic Association’s help, even though its Competitive Balance Proposal seems to directly address what happened to his Thurgood Marshall High School boys basketball team in March.

Marshall, a public school in Dayton, lost 57-46 in the state championship game to Akron St. Vincent-St. Mary, a private Catholic school. Under the OHSAA’s current system, both schools compete in Division II. Should the OHSAA’s proposal pass — member schools can cast their votes until mid-May — there’s a chance Marshall will play in a lower division or St. Vincent-St. Mary in a higher one.

Maybe in a different world, Marshall would have won a state championship this past season. That’s just not a scenario Hoskins thinks about. He likes things as they are, and it’s the socioeconomic factor — one of three ways the OHSAA would use to determine athletic counts for each school — that bothers him as much as anything.

The socioeconomic factor takes into account the number of free-lunch participants within a high school or school district. Children qualify for free lunches if they come from families with incomes at or below 130 percent of the poverty level.

“I think that’s crazy,” Hoskins said. “That should have no bearing at all. It would certainly benefit Marshall, but my kids take on the personality of their coach, and we’re going to take on all comers, regardless of socioeconomic factors.

“I’m preaching to my kids, ‘You’re no different than anyone else. Don’t use your conditions, your difficulties as an excuse. Society wouldn’t want you to use it as an excuse.’ Certain advantages are given to certain schools because of where they’re at, but you have to play the hand you’re dealt.”

Factor in success

According to the OHSAA, the Thurgood Marshalls of the world always will have an unbalanced hand. Tim Stried, the OHSAA’s director of information services, said social and economic factors play large roles in athletic success. That’s why it is one of the three parts of the proposal, along with tradition and school boundaries.

“For example, in some affluent school districts,” Stried said, “many of the students receive private lessons and attend summer instructional camps, while in disadvantaged school districts, many of the students cannot even afford proper athletic apparel, let alone extra training.

“There are several ways to measure socioeconomics in a given school district, but many of them are either objective or difficult to measure. It was determined that a school’s free-lunch count, which is a federal program, was a good way to determine a district’s socioeconomic makeup. The higher a district’s free-lunch count, the more likely that its students face socioeconomic disadvantages.”

The difference in the number of school lunches between two schools currently in the same division can be major.

Last fall, Springfield High School met Hilliard Davidson in the second round of the Division I football playoffs. According to the Ohio Department of Education, Springfield has 1,033 students participating in the free-lunch program out of 1,822. Davidson, a school with 1,446 students, has just 242 participants.

Still, Springfield Athletic Director Mark Stoll said all schools in the Greater Western Ohio Conference met to discuss the proposal, and he said the conference is “adamantly opposed” to it.

“We were all encouraged to vote against it, and I’m inclined to go with them on that,” Stoll said. “I don’t see the benefit of it for Springfield High School. There has to be changes, but the current (proposal) doesn’t benefit us. We have our share of kids on free and reduced lunch, but I don’t see the numbers as that significant to benefit Springfield.”

Stoll commended the OHSAA for making the effort, but said there has to be a better model for structuring divisions. He said Springfield’s weight rooms and training facilities are top notch and dismissed the significance of the number of free-lunch participants to winning.

“Football is game of numbers,” Stoll said. “Last year when we played Hilliard Davidson, they had over 100 kids. I think we had in the 50s. We want to get more kids involved, and success will create those numbers. When you’re consistently dealing with those numbers that range from 100 to 125, that puts us at a distinct disadvantage.”

Count all students

Like Hoskins, St. Paris Graham Athletic Director and boys basketball coach Brook Cupps has had success on the state level against schools with more socioeconomic advantages. Cupps led his team to the state semifinals in 2008, beating a private school, Alter, in the regional final.

“I don’t like the whole public-private debate,” Cupps said. “If we’re going to win a state title, I want to say we beat everyone in our division. I don’t want to stay we beat everyone but the private schools.”

Hamilton Badin Athletic Director Sally Kocher has another way of looking at the socioeconomic factor. The way the OHSAA would calculate a school’s athletic count under the proposal, a school with 100 free-lunch participants would have 10 students subtracted from its count.

“One of the ADs in our league, he’s fired up about the socioeconomic factor and how you can discount students,” Kocher said. “How can you just pretend those kids don’t exist in your enrollment when many of them are fine athletes, fine students? How do you just pretend they’re not there?

“I get that if you’re underprivileged you might not have a way to get to and from practice, you might have to work and don’t have any time for sports. But to me, as the AD in the league said, it’s basically saying they don’t count. And that’s not right, either.”

For some coaches, the proposal doesn’t go far enough to address the problem. New Middletown football coach Troy Everhart said the proposal won’t affect Division I, at least in football. He looks at it as a proposal for the lower divisions.

“If you really want competitive balance, you say every budget has to be the same,” Everhart said. “That’s never going to happen.”

Dunbar football coach James Lacking said some type of change is inevitable, but he’s not fond of this proposal.

“We lost to a Catholic school in the playoffs this year,” Lacking said. “I think sometimes competing against those schools will make a program better. At the same time, if we didn’t have a Catholic school in the way, maybe we could have advanced farther. I really don’t know.”

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0351 or djablonski@coxohio.com.