Incompetence Has Struck Again

This editorial was printed in a less specific, truncated form in the Downers Grove North school newspaper, Omega, on Dec. 20. The extended version printed here focuses more on the faulty policy interpretation of the IHSA and their various false claims, and how it specifically affected the sport of cross country. Any Illinois runners who read this--please print it off and give it to your coach. Coaches--please consider giving this to your athletic directors and principals. Something needs to be done--and I think change can happen.

Incompetence Has Struck Again:

Poorly interpreted policies hold back student-athletes, keep runners from state meet

by Jacob Brower

A sign over the Benet Academy team tent read "Statetionals," and runners and fans alike could be seen wearing t-shirts emblazoned with slogans like "Schaumburg: The Real Class 3A State Meet." Internet forums were blazing, and editorials were pouring from local newspapers, but it all came down to a distance running bloodbath on the field at Busse Woods Forest Preserve, the Oct. 27 site of the Schaumburg sectional—from which five teams would qualify for the class 3A boys’ state cross country meet. Ten or so teams would be left behind, despite being ranked within the top twenty-five in all of Illinois. Many knew there was little hope of advancing, and were approaching the qualifying round as the real state meet.

"We saw Schaumburg as the first of two state meets," said junior Alex Lyons, former state track qualifier and a varsity runner at highly ranked Lyons Township. "Our coach actually tried to design our training so that we would peak at our sectional because of how many quality teams were there. We felt like any team that got out of that sectional was going to be top five to top ten at the state meet."

All five boys’ teams qualifying out of Schaumburg would go on to finish in the top seven at the state meet, ahead of the second qualifier from any other sectional. The first four girls’ teams from Schaumburg would go first through fourth at the state meet—the last would finish tenth. The two weakest sectionals would yield the last six teams at state finals.

Geographic Intent
The standard was set earlier in the year, when, according to an Oct. 8 Sun Times article by Tina Akouris, IHSA assistant executive director Ron McGraw, the administrator in charge of cross country, stated that the cross country state series "are not intended to advance the best teams." The goal was followed through excellently on that point, as approximately ten ranked teams were left out of the boys’ 3A state meet, while many less deserving squads made the trip to Peoria.

Policy 19, the guideline used to establish this goal, states that sectional and regional assignments in all sanctioned sports are intended to advance teams to the state meet that encompass a geographic representation of the entire state, and that no consideration be given to the strength of teams in a certain area. The Illinois High School Association (IHSA) claims that this makes it impossible to avoid unfair sectional assignments, and it is acknowledged that the best teams will not necessarily be the ones competing in the state finals.

For some reason, with the season over, there has been no mention of the fact that despite continuously hiding behind Policy 19, the IHSA seems to have interpreted their policies strangely, not achieved the goals they were arguing for, and not done as much as was possible to benefit the athletes in their governance. McGraw claimed that the true intent of Policy 19 was to "provide the most opportunity for the masses," which, unfortunately, was a goal at which the IHSA failed miserably, as they were unable to represent an even remotely geographically broad section of Illinois’ geography at the state cross country meet.

"The fact is that this [sectional assignments] is not a new concern and I can’t foresee that it will change in the immediate future," said McGraw in a Chicago Suburban News article by Mike Considine. "It’s not about being fair or unfair. It’s about the application of these policies across the entire state. It works better for some areas than others. It’s clear that it doesn’t work very well for class 3A cross country."

The IHSA already attempted to address the need for geographical representation—pushed by principals of the smaller, non-Chicagoland schools—by breaking the traditional two class system for cross country into three classes: 1A, 2A, and 3A, listed from smallest student body to largest, respectively. Since southern and central Illinois are primarily represented by the smaller two classes, and the majority of the Chicagoland teams are part of class 3A, the new system already accounts for the geographic disparity of a two class state meet by allowing smaller schools their own level at which to participate.

Unfortunately, the IHSA continues to treat boys’ cross country like three separate sports—seeding each class on a different map for its own geographic representation, instead of admitting that it is one sport represented by three separate classes. Nowhere in Policy 19 does it mention that each class must be considered separately when referring to the overall geographic representation of the state meet.

"The policy ensures that geographic representation is the key to assignments," said McGraw in an Omega interview. "The three classes are treated as separate groups. Each class has its own map that I use when making assignments. It [Policy 19] is very clear as to its intent. Part number one states that: ‘The state series is designed to determine a state champion. The state series is not intended to necessarily advance the best teams in the state to the state final.’"

The IHSA has continually pointed out that even in football and basketball state finals, there is no emphasis on getting the two best teams to finals. Yet, Policy 19 has separate guidelines for seeding bracketed team sports such as football and basketball, which state that "seeding should only occur at the lowest level of competition." So, while bracketed state finals won’t necessarily contain the two teams with the best records, they will have allowed for talent via seeding at the lowest level of competition, which put the four strongest teams in separate parts of the bracket–and the teams that ultimately perform the best in the post-season make finals, which is not the case in the cross country system. Since cross country is formatted with twenty teams making finals, instead of two, the seeding should be done at the very lowest level—the regional tournaments. Regionals seeded primarily based on the historical strength of area programs would alleviate the stranglehold that occurs in sectionals such as this year’s at Schaumburg, without drastically changing a geographic policy that doesn’t work.

The Failings of Policy 19
Despite the IHSA’s staunch verbal backing of Policy 19, the ridiculous sectional assignments only managed to advance teams from 31 of Illinois’ 102 counties to the state meet—between all three classes. Twenty of the counties were represented by only one team each, meaning that the vast majority of the field was centered around eleven counties, or about one tenth of the state’s entire geographic area.

In class 3A, boys and girls combined, 39 of the 40 state qualifying teams were from the Chicago-area—only one was from the South–-hardly the geographic spectrum the IHSA seemed to be aiming for with Policy 19. The disparity is logical enough in its own right—3A is comprised of the largest schools in the state, located mostly in the suburbs of Chicago. However, since the assignments were so lopsided, and they still only managed to include suburban teams, it seems like all the IHSA did was manage to invite weaker squads from the same area. Instead of hiding behind the ridiculous geographic argument when it comes to class 3A sectional assignments, the IHSA should just admit that central and southern Illinois are represented by the smaller classes, and that the 3A teams will come primarily from the Chicago-area.

Of course, it’s clear that the IHSA didn’t really assign the teams to specific sectionals in a coherent geographic manner in the first place. The four class 3A sectionals were located in Schaumburg, Palatine, Skokie, and Normal. Palatine and Schaumburg—the sectional that was assigned sixteen of the top twenty-five teams in the state—are only 15 minutes away from each other, and Skokie is only another 40 further. That makes sense, considering that the majority of 3A schools are in these areas, but how can McGraw and the IHSA claim that such physically close sectionals were assigned with geographic representation in mind? Seventy-five percent of the schools fighting for the state meet were doing so in sectionals located in the Chicago area, and even the sectional that was two hours away in Normal included a Chicago-area team—Neuqua Valley, the recent boys’ cross country national champions.

One needs only to consider the fact that two of the three schools in Naperville—North and Central—ran in the stacked Schaumburg sectional, whereas Neuqua Valley, also in Naperville, was forced to drive two hours to the single southern sectional. If the goal was to get the southern teams to the state meet, it wouldn’t make much sense to send the top team in the country all the way down to Normal, past the other sectionals, and deny the non Chicago-area schools a chance to qualify. Since the Naperville schools were split into sectionals hours apart, it makes even less sense that teams like Evanston and Thornridge were competing in the same sectional, or that Granite City had to drive three hours to Normal in order to fulfill their "geographic" assignment.

"In order to appreciate the assignment of any one school you would need to see the entire assignment map and understand that it is all interrelated," said McGraw, "You cannot simply look at one or two schools and truly attempt to understand the process. In this system there are always schools on the edge of a cluster that could have gone one direction or the other. Sometimes it is a function of attempting to assign the same number of schools to each sectional."

Of course, Policy 19 specifically states that the state series must only have a "reasonable balance of schools assigned to each first-level site." For cross country, that would apply to regionals, which could, based on the rules, be seeded unevenly, making it a rather moot argument that the map would have to be altered as drastically as would seem necessary to include Neuqua Valley in the Normal sectional, instead of any of the three closer tournament sites.

The Solution
McGraw says that Policy 19 cannot be ignored without changes put in place by the advisory, made up of principals, who would have to vote for talent-seeded sectional assignments, but the truth remains that all sports are different and as such have different needs—and if the IHSA board of directors really thought it was a problem, they could choose to amend the specific policy. Unfortunately, it seems as thought the board of directors may be unwilling to make that much effort for cross country. According to McGraw, the athletic director advisory council passed a vote calling for a fifth 3A sectional to further spread out the talent in the western suburbs, but the administrators and board of directors decided not to pass a change to an already new–-yet flawed-–policy.

"The IHSA board of directors has complete control over changing any policy,"
said McGraw, "including Policy 19."

In the first Omega article about the sectional assignments, McGraw was asked whether he thought the sectional assignments were fair. He replied, "Based upon the language, directives, and ultimate goal of Policy 19, yes I do."

When asked the same question in our latest interview, his response hadn’t changed, but he wondered, if as an objective reporter, I didn’t agree, when presented with all the facts and details of Policy 19 that I had previously been unclear on. Honestly, I still feel the same way I did before interviewing him. I don’t think the IHSA did as much as it could–-even within the parameters of Policy 19–-to make the state series as fair as possible. The policy is vague in places that would allow for some changes to be made, and the board of directors could amend it as long as they followed to geographic principle. Now I have a clearer picture of the difficulty of applying Policy 19 to all the sports, and the process that the IHSA must go through to make changes–-there are other runners that can also appreciate this–-yet it still seems like more effort could be made to even the playing field just a little bit, which is all that anyone has really asked.

"I don’t want to be making excuses for what happened [to Lyons Township] at sectionals. We did not run well and we got beat," said Lyons. "The IHSA does not control how well we race, so I do not hold them responsible for our finish…but my guess is other teams like Geneva were feeling like they ran a strong race and got left out thanks to a poor decision by the IHSA. [The Schaumburg sectional] takes away the opportunity to race the state meet from some of the most successful programs in our state. The state meet should be as close to the best 20 teams as it can be. Obviously, it will never be perfect."

With a few minor tweaks though, it could be immeasurably more fair. Considering the class 3A didn’t have a broad geographic base in the first place, the best solution I can see that would still fall into the same geographic principle that was upheld at this year’s state meet would be for the board of directors to concede that there are significant issues with the application of Policy 19 on boys cross country, as well as other non-major sports like volleyball and swimming. Specific guidelines could be added, similar to the policy for bracketed tournaments, which allow for seeding at the regional level–-which would be done in more reasonable geographic boundaries. With three sectionals in the same general area, this wouldn’t seem to be all that difficult with only a slight amendment to IHSA policy.

Clearly assignments will never be perfect–a few teams will always be right on the cusp, but as long as there is a sport with 20 teams in the finals, there should be an effort to get the best teams possible, within the directives, to the meet. If the only real goal, as stated in Policy 19's current form, is to crown a state champion–-why are there three trophies, and medals that go twenty-five deep? As long as more than two teams compete for the win, in a very deep sport such as Illinois cross-country, then the state meet should be comprised of the very best field that can be accumulated within the rules.