To avoid Gorman, Northern schools willing to end true state playoffs

We who grew up in Las Vegas learned at a young age the importance of beating a high school from Reno in the state tournament. If you played football, the goal was to win the zone championship game at the Silver Bowl, then to carry the flag for Southern Nevada when taking on a team from the north for a state title.

Times have surely changed over the past 20-some years. The Silver Bowl is Sam Boyd Stadium, after all.

Reno-area high school athletic officials, so frustrated with a decade of taking second place to Bishop Gorman in football and basketball, are well on their way to making it to where the days of a north-south state championship are over in the large-school classification for all sports.

The Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association’s Board of Control in January will be asked to approve a new 5A classification for high-enrollment, perennially competitive schools such as Gorman, Coronado and Palo Verde. But instead of aligning Reno schools currently in the large-school classification to the 5A, those schools are asking to play down a level, where state would be contested against less competitive Las Vegas schools such as Valley and Eldorado in the remade class 4A.

With only Las Vegas schools, the class 5A “state champion” would be purely mythical and make Saturday’s football championship between Gorman and Reno’s Reed High the last of its kind. That’s a true shame, especially for us native Nevadans who easily recall our battles with schools from the other part of the state. (My soccer team took state in 1993 at Chaparral. Go Cowboys!)

As one Las Vegas-area coach posted on Twitter, “Protecting the weak and punishing kids who want to be great. The is no more State championships after this year. It’s all participation trophies. New wave!”

While the North’s logic of