re: Can someone explain the LHSAA situation to me?

1. There is more backstory to this than just the Principal of Winnfield, but she's the one that took the bull by the horns and started politicking because her school finally made it to the Superdome and got beat by John Curtis Christian School 33-3. Some in the other threads assert that the move for the split started 12 or 13 years ago.

Blame is apportioned equally to the Catholic League in New Orleans for not accepting John Curtis way back, and by many schools in all divisions who forced John Curtis and Evangel Christian to play at their enrollment classification. Thus, for years they destroyed AA competition.

Either way, after Winnfield's loss, the principal went nuts, and began leading a charge in which she was successful to force select schools (those schools that can "select" who attends) and non-select schools (those that can NOT "select who attends...public schools) to have their own or split playoffs. She did this by galvanizing support from a vast majority of public school principals, enough to garner enough votes at the LHSAA meetings. Principal Norman Booker, of Many, has since, got enough votes to expand the split to basketball, volleyball and softball/baseball.

They have done this while, Catholic League excepted, maintaining mixed districts in regular season play.

2. A school is select when it can choose which students to accept or select. All private schools are select, because they are private and can reject students. Public magnet schools may also be select as they can also turn away students for any reason. There are a couple in the state, but some have switched from one to the other.

3. I'm sure there is corruption, it's a Louisiana-based association, after all. They hired a new CEO a couple years ago to fix it, and he has not been able to get the public schools (non-select) to change their minds, and instead they've split in other sports, now. He has to abide by their wishes because the LHSAA is a voting membership-driven organization. He's either got to live with it or resign.

5. It affects the kids by "watering-down" the competition. There are five classifications of public schools and four divisions of private schools, thus there are nine state championships in football. The rest of the split has not yet been implemented. It means that the AAAAA and the Division I each crown a champion, and both claim to be State Champions of the largest schools. AAAAA can still fill a 32 team bracket because there are enough schools (although more than a few will have losing records for the regular season) Division I has 10 schools so at least two schools get byes in the first round. The second round is, already, the quarter-finals.

I don't know if that directly affects the kids, per se. But down in the smaller classifications it does, because there was at least one winless school and quite a few one and two win schools down there. As #32 seeds, they were consigned to getting totally pummeled in the first round. That's got to affect somebody.



The selects, all together still don't amount to half of the voting population, so they are forced to accept whatever the public school principals decide and vote on. Thus the serious consideration of creating their own entity so that they have at least a reasonable chance of enacting rules or structures in their own best interest. Even if you get them all to vote one way, they still lose. Who, in their right thinking, wants to belong to an organization where all policy is made by vote, and not be able to affect that vote?