In Louisiana, the Louisiana High School Athletic Association (LHSAA) has been receiving complaints regarding its public and private school split.
“There is a tremendous amount of distrust between public school and private schools,” said Ken Trahan, sports analyst.
Principles from across the state are voting to split up the LHSAA for three sports: baseball, softball and basketball.
High school football has already split up from the LHSAA a few years ago. In order to provide enough league champions in all the sports, football increased its number of championship games from five to nine, and the other three sports will go up from seven to 14 championship games.
Some state principles, however, are against the decision to split up the public and private school and think it could lead to more problems in the future.
“If we did this,” said J.T. Curtis, headmaster of John Curtis Christian High School, “we would open it up to anybody that would want to join this organization.
The LHSAA is nervous that the decision could lead to not even having enough teams to fill playoff brackets in all three sports.
“We didn’t have enough teams to fill 32 brackets,” said Eddie Bonnie, LHSAA’s director, “16 team brackets and, in some cases, 18 brackets.”
A high school basketball team not being able to play in the playoffs due to private and public school arguments would be detrimental to the kids, the sport, and all of athletics. Kids, no matter what state they are in or where they are from, love playing sports and love competing in the playoffs. Taking that away from them could have some serious consequences.
This country is already far too overweight and kids are a big part of that. The ones that do not play sports, for the most part, are the ones that aren’t as active and could potentially be much heavier and less healthy than their athletic counterparts. Giving kids reasons to not play sports is never a good option.
Talks are still surfacing around the state about what will happen and nothing is set in stone yet. Curtis believes that the timetable for the split to happen is within the next year.