Playoff debate comes down to optics
Walk through the wroughtiron gates with matching lions, and you can see the pride Blanchard has in its football team.
A low-slung but wellkept red brick building houses the locker rooms and lists playoff appearances. A shipping container painted maroon proclaims this “HOME OF THE LIONS.” The yard lines on the field look so crisp that they could’ve been painted over the weekend.
Folks in the small town southwest of Oklahoma City care about their football.
The same goes for folks at Heritage Hall.
Drive 35 minutes almost due north from Blanchard, pull through the wrought-iron gates at the Oklahoma City private school, and you’ll see the pride, too. It’s there in the pristine scoreboard, the towering stands and the adjoining athletic center.
These two schools have many similarities, right down to the classification in which they’ve competed for the better part of a decade, and yet you only need go through their gates tosee differences — and that gets to the heart of our state’s latest
iteration of the publicprivate debate in high school sports. Optics.
On Wednesday, Blanchard Superintendent Jim Beckham will present a proposal to the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association board of directors that would change the way private, magnet and charter schools are classified. They would be allowed to play any school during the regular season, but once the postseason began, they would compete in their own playoff system. Public vs. public. Non-public vs. non-public.
It’s anyone’s guess whether this proposal will gain any traction. I’m going to guess the OSSAA is against it because of potential legal blowback because other state groups overseeing high school sports have been sued after attempting to separate private schools that were already members. But there is clearly interest in looking again at the private-public issue as nearly two dozen school superintendents signed Beckham’s proposal to allow it in front of the board of directors.
Ultimately, nothing may change.
Or the rules may be tweaked.
Or the system could be totally overhauled.
But for as long as this debate rages — and I’m going to guess this is the latest but not the last chapter in this squabble — it’s always going to come back to those optics. How things look. How they feel.
And from where lots of folks are sitting, things don’t look or feel fair.
Discrepancies between public and private schools don’t seem all that striking in the bigger classes. When Bishop McGuinness plays Carl Albert or Del City in the Class 5A football playoffs, it sure looks like a fair fight. When the state volleyball bracket for Class 5A has Claremore and Skiatook alongside Mount St. Mary and Lincoln Christian, the world doesn’t seem off its axis.
Look at the smaller classes, though, and things tend to skew.
Next season, for example, Class 3A football will have several interesting district bedfellows. Heritage Hall will play alongside the likes of Blackwell, Bridge Creek and Mannford while Cascia Hall will compete with Inola, Berryhill and Jay.
There may be Oklahoma high schools in the same class that are more different from Jay and Cascia Hall, but I’m not sure what they would be.
One is not different better.
One is not different worse.
But they are different for sure.
So it goes with Blanchard and Heritage Hall. Both have really good football programs. Good historically with long stretches of success. Good recently with state titles won during this decade.
But football looks different at these two schools. It’s not that the players are vastly different. Ditto for the coaches. It’s more about the packaging.
Both have immaculate scoreboards, but Heritage Hall’s is about twice as tall. Both have stately bleachers, but Heritage Hall’s are bricked in while Blanchard’s are the metal variety.
And for most teams in their class, football looks way more like Blanchard than Heritage Hall. Ada, Bethany, Blanchard, Broken Bow, Heritage Hall, Hilldale, Oologah and Wagoner won at least one postseason game in the Class 4A playoffs in the fall.
One of these things is not like the other.
Yes, Heritage Hall had similar enrollment to those other playoff teams — truth be told, it actually had fewer students but was bumped up to their class because of the “success multiplier” instituted for private schools a few years back — but it looks more like a small college than a small town.
And those optics cloud everything else.
I know because I grew up in a town like Blanchard. My hometown in rural Kansas was also a Class 4A school, and most of the time, Clay Center played teams from other rural towns.
But then, there was Topeka Hayden.
The private school was also in our class, and to people in Clay Center, it might as well have been on Mars. It was different. It was foreign.
And it wasn’t because Hayden always won. Clay Center got the better of the matchup from time to time.
But the perception was that Hayden always had an advantage because the players probably came from far outside Topeka. Or they got scholarships. Or they were recruited, possibly even paid.
Such thinking was kookiness, of course.
Folks in my hometown are pretty darn awesome, but all logic seemed to vanish where Hayden was concerned. A small-town team playing a big-city private school in the playoffs just wasn’t fair somehow.
Didn’t look right. Didn’t feel right. And so it is with the public-private debate in Oklahoma. I don’t know what the answer is, and frankly, if there was one, wouldn’t we have found it by now?
But I can see why some folks want to look at the issue again.
They want to change the optics.