COLUMN: High school realignment

After Ronan’s football team dump-trucked Troy two weeks ago, Troy coach Jim Dasios gave me a monologue on the unfairness surrounding the Montana High School Association classification system.

“They need to do something about the realignment of the whole B football,” Dasios said. “…When you play a school of 300 kids against a school of 130 kids, this is what’s going to happen. It’s not good for the kids, and what’s going to happen is the kids will stop coming out.”

On the surface, I see the coach’s point; Ronan’s enrollment (321) is more than double Troy’s (136).

But let’s really sit down and think about this for a second. How much are we willing to dilute high school sports for the sake of “fairness?”

I’ve seen high school sports in quite a few states—Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Montana—all with different classification systems, and there are always winners and losers when it comes to realignment.

I’ve studied this topic excessively, even doing a high school senior project using Geographical Information Systems to realign Virginia high schools for the most fair and cost-efficient system. It was pretty awesome.

Now I haven’t taken the time to do this with Montana, but just looking at the numbers provided by the MHSA, nine of the 40 schools in Class B are smaller than Troy. Last I checked, Ronan, the largest school in Class B, wasn’t even a playoff team last season. Neither was Eureka, the second-largest school in B.

Look at other classifications; Billings Central, the dominant school in Class A football in the past decade has the third smallest enrollment in A at 329.

Seeley-Swan is the fourth-largest school in 8-man football, and they just ended a three-year losing streak.

The other argument Dasios made is the one that really set me off, though. He acted as though his team had no choice but to play Ronan in football.

With eight games scheduled, minus Troy itself, there are 31 Class B teams in Montana that Troy is not playing this season. The Trojans only play one school smaller than their own (St. Ignatius, enrollment 126).

And before anyone makes the driving time counterpoint, we didn’t even mention Idaho.

I get it, coach; you’re a coach with 18 kids going up against the largest school in your classification. A few people get hurt in the first half, the game gets out of hand, and it seems like you against the world. But ask yourself, is the NCAA basketball tournament any better with 68 teams than it was with 65? Doesn’t the question just become, “Why did team No. 69 get left out?”

Ponder this: Do you really want to hang a state championship banner knowing you only beat a few teams to get there?

I didn’t think so.