The Virginia Plan

[FatCat]

First, I want to amend my response to ELA about if Greenbrier had to play privates in the playoffs. Actually, I wouldn't mind because I believe the competition is pretty close between us and the private schools we play in football. We played both David Lipscomb and DCA the last two years in the regular season and won 1 out of the 4 and competed well in all three losses. Having to play those guys in the playoffs would be a great challenge and incentive for our boys each year because our talent level is not that far off from theirs.

 

My response initially is if Greenbrier were to be a rural 1A school having to face what they are facing. That I would not like. But we are not.....we are 3A and can compete with the privates. So can 4A schools. We play tough schools all the time. We play Lipscomb again this year, as well as White House (4A) and Beech (5A). It only makes you better. But, for the 1A schools, I agree that they are at a great disadvantage with similar size privates.

 

Now, as to yellowdog's comment about their being only about 1/2 of the 1A schools left to play football in a 4A system. I don't see a problem with that. As a matter of fact, it would probably be just about right because the further you go down the 1A ladder, the bigger the disparity among public schools alone.

 

And, I don't care what the final resolution of the public/private situation.....you can make a 4A system work quite easily. The classification system we have now is too confusing, too complicated, and frankly pretty darn stupid. You can't keep up with who is in your Region/District from sport to sport, you travel ungodly miles in football and it is difficult to maintain true regional rivals.

[CoachT]

The classification system we have now is too confusing, too complicated, and frankly pretty darn stupid.  You can't keep up with who is in your Region/District from sport to sport, you travel ungodly miles in football and it is difficult to maintain true regional rivals.

This is precisely why I like the VA Plan. We know 3 classifications works well for all non-football sports so why not adapt the football playoffs a little to fit the AAA plan instead of changing every sport to a AAAA plan. This situation would promote better rivalries between both schools and individual athletes.

 

Another thing that is attractive is that you don't have to study every region, look at all of the possible alignments, because every school will be playing the same schools in football that they play now in basketball. Travel, etc, is a "known", not an unknown.

[GWAVE1]

I was only talking about football playing schools, yellowdog. I have not tried to make it work for all other sports. However, I do not believe that with alittle thought that it would not work out either. 5 champions in public and now 3 in private are way to many for a state of this size. The Virginia Plan would get my interest more if the privates and publics were grouped back together.

[FatCat]

Each region would be divided based on the enrollment of those schools only. You could have a case where a small school from one region is bigger than the large schools from another region.

 

The cutoff for Class AAA would be around 950-1000 students.

Coach T,

 

I go back to your post from last week concerning the problems with the Virginia Plan, but I'll be more specific this time. There are at least two parts of this plan that are inherently unfair.

 

The first inherently unfair part of the Virginia Plan is the schedule difficulty. A "small" school that plays in a region that averages over 1700 students per school inherently has a more difficult schedule than the "small" school that playes in a region that averages only about 1200-1300 students per school.

 

The second inherently unfair part of the Virginia Plan goes back to what I said earlier. What sense does it make to have classifications if a "small" school from one region is bigger than a "large" school from another region. That means a couple of schools with a population of 1600 - 1800 could be playing against a group of schools composed mainly with an average population of 1200 for the right to be "state champion". The larger schools could "unfairly" win a state championship due to the gross imbalance of the student populations.

 

But, even worse than that is the inverse. You could have a school that is 1300-1400 students that is the largest in their region competing against schools that average over 1800 students for a "state championship". That smaller "large" school could be the best team in the "small" group category (where they belong based on the numbers) but end up left out in the cold due to the imbalance.

 

Some may say that the first problem I identified (schedule imbalance) will help eliminate the second problem (big vs. small). But, the plan is to take the best two small schools and the best two large schools in a region. So, even though the big "small" school may have a 5-5 record, if they are one of the top "small" schools in their region, they can still beat up on the smaller schools in the "small" school playoffs.

 

Then, for the inverse, you may have a small "large" school that gets to make the playoffs when a true "large" school doesn't because of the schedule imbalance.

 

Coach T, the bottom line is, IMO, that this Virginia Plan is also very confusing and creates an imbalance of fair competition. I don't see how this plan makes anything any better except for not having to break up the existing baseball/basketball regions/districts. Again, I don't know the history behind why the existing baseball/basketball regions/districts are such a big deal, but our existing baseball/basketball district (District 8-AA) includes a bunch of schools that are not considered rivals at all. We might as well have teams from KY in our district. The only ones we care about are Springfield, Portland and Lipscomb. The others might as well be John Doe HS.

 

I am not closed-minded about this, I just haven't heard anything yet that shows why the issues I identified above are not a real concern or why they don't matter. I would greatly welcome some insight so I can understand better!

 

Thanks!

[CoachT]

Excellent points. Thanks.

[BigTommy]

call me crazy but this plan seems to favor the small schools. If the small schools dont have as good of a season(which is the case many times) then they still go to the playoffs over a bigger school who may have won more games. If the smaller schools are going to play with the big dogs then they should have to beat the bigi dogs.