It was sometime during the semifinals of the boys’ state basketball tournament last weekend that it hit me. It is now clearer than ever that other than in Class A, Chattanooga teams are no threat to win a public school state championship any time soon.
In the last 11 years, seven boys’ teams from Hamilton County have played for state championships, with four winning them. All were in Class A. No Hamilton County team has advanced past the semifinals of the Class AA or AAA tournaments in that same span, and last week Howard (AA) and Red Bank (AAA) were both soundly beaten in the semifinals by Memphis teams that didn’t even win championships themselves.
Like it or not, we’d better embrace our small-school teams because those are the only serious contenders for the foreseeable future. The reason is because compared with Memphis, Nashville and Knoxville, Hamilton County has an overabundance of high schools.
As a parent, I understand the desire to provide our kids with the best education possible. And because of a lack of faith in our public school system and the fact that few families can afford the $18,000 annual tuition at Baylor, GPS or McCallie, we have become Tennessee’s home of the small private school.
According to the 2006 census, Hamilton County has around 313,000 residents. Davidson County (Nashville) has nearly double that total, Shelby (Memphis) triples our population and Knox County has about 100,000 more residents. But Hamilton has exactly the same number of Class A programs as those three counties combined.
The addition of two more high schools this year will bring the total number of public and private secondary schools in Hamilton County to 26. Nine of those will compete in the TSSAA’s smallest classification, including seven with enrollments of around 300 students or fewer.
Put simply, our best local athletes are now so scattered throughout the county that the talent pool has become too shallow to support the large-school programs.
Brainerd is the last boys’ basketball program from the county to both win a championship (1992) and reach a title game (1997) in any classification higher than Class A, making this by far the longest title drought our county has had since the TSSAA began its three-classification system in 1976.
But it isn’t just basketball that’s being affected. Although we’re still dominant in wrestling and softball, only one public school team — Red Bank in football — has claimed a large-school state title in one of the major revenue-producing sports in the last 10 years. We haven’t had a public school champion in baseball since Central in 1987.
Twenty-one Memphis schools have played in the Class AA and AAA basketball finals since our last representative, and the Knoxville/Maryville area dominates football with 15 state champions since Red Bank’s title.
All the while, we have added six new Class A schools in the last 10 years. We’ve become the state’s pesky little brother for high school athletics.
Stephen has covered high school sports in the tri-state area since the early 1990s, starting at the News-Free Press as a 19-year-old reporter. He has been with the Times Free Press since its inception and has been an assistant sports editor for more than seven years. Stephen is among the most decorated writers in the TFP’s newsroom, winning numerous state and regional awards for his writing on high school athletics. He has two children, Riley ...
