Interesting read about Illinois success factor
- Thread starter Coach G34
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Hope pretty much dominates in 6A too. Take a look at their early season schedule and results. Hope is just a great program at any level.
This would be a bad idea, as set forth in the article. It basically is the promotion/relegation system used in international soccer, where teams move up or down based on their success on the field. The problem is that the players change from year to year in high school, and so teams would be playing at a level determined by the success (or lack of success) of players who are no longer there.
Hope basketball is an outlier example because their success has been so prolonged. A more common example might be Sandia Prep baseball. Prep, a 4A team, went 29-1 in 2015 and 27-4 in 2016 (with all four losses to out of state teams). If this system were in place, they would have moved up to 5A. But that two-year run was based on an exceptional couple of classes of baseball players. In 2017, after those kids had graduated, Prep was 12-15 with a team featuring a lot of 8th and 9th graders. Had they been forced to play in 5A, they probably would have finished far worse.
The other problem with this system is that you would have to do it on a sport-by-sport basis - otherwise you might have one team from a school that deserved to move up (like Artesia football), but another team from the same school that clearly did not (like Artesia soccer, which went 2-16-2 last year). And New Mexico has never had a system where teams at the same school play in different classifications.
Hope basketball is an outlier example because their success has been so prolonged. A more common example might be Sandia Prep baseball. Prep, a 4A team, went 29-1 in 2015 and 27-4 in 2016 (with all four losses to out of state teams). If this system were in place, they would have moved up to 5A. But that two-year run was based on an exceptional couple of classes of baseball players. In 2017, after those kids had graduated, Prep was 12-15 with a team featuring a lot of 8th and 9th graders. Had they been forced to play in 5A, they probably would have finished far worse.
The other problem with this system is that you would have to do it on a sport-by-sport basis - otherwise you might have one team from a school that deserved to move up (like Artesia football), but another team from the same school that clearly did not (like Artesia soccer, which went 2-16-2 last year). And New Mexico has never had a system where teams at the same school play in different classifications.
I read that article again and saw that the rule in Illinois only applied to private schools, so my Artesia example wouldn't apply. But I think you could apply the same rationale to public schools as private schools. In other words, if the goal of the rule is to level the playing field, why not apply it to public schools that dominate at their level of competition for a sustained period (like Piedra Vista wrestling before they moved up).
While that may be true, lets look at their recent history against 6A schools
16/17 - 10-4
15/16 - 9-2
14/15 - 10-4
13/14 - 9-3
That's 38-13, or a 75% win percentage against 6A schools...
Personally i like the idea of Promotion/Relegation but it may be too much for the NMAA to handle. How bout we go back to 2 classifications, Big School and Small School.
Yes , and they are playing 4A. Did you read in the New Mexican where Hope petitioned to play 6A basketball several years ago and the NMAA turned them down?
I don't know about the 2 class system because most of the teams in 2 and 3A would get left out. Only a few 5A teams could compete with the big schools, especially in football.
