TSSAA Legislative Council flooded with information

Soddy-Daisy High School principal Danny Gilbert speaks to area coaches and athletic directors at the Chattanooga Christian School gym about  a new proposal for how to classify sports teams.
Soddy-Daisy High School principal Danny Gilbert speaks to area coaches and athletic directors at the Chattanooga Christian School gym about a new proposal for how to classify sports teams.

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. - After more than five hours of discussion and nearly 300 pages of information concerning a possible public-private split, the only thing accomplished during Thursday's TSSAA Legislative Council meeting was creating more confusion.

And that's just the way TSSAA executive director Bernard Childress and his staff planned it.

"Absolutely we wanted to give (council members) so much information that they leave the meeting understanding the problem is bigger than just public-private," Childress said. "If you're going to address the issue, first you need to recognize what the real issue is. I'm not sure they ever did that today.

"There are also issues with open-enrollment schools and magnet schools, and if we don't address those concerns now we will only be coming back a few years from now and dealing with it then. But they have enough to think about that hopefully when they come back to vote on it they will understand you can't just move a group of schools that don't want to be moved. That's not fair to the organization."

When the council meets July 16 to vote, the only item on the agenda will be whether to pass a proposal made by Trousdale County and Lewis County in January 2014 to completely split all private schools into Division II.

However, the council could still opt to vote in favor of one of the other four proposals discussed Thursday: leaving things as they are currently, bringing all public and private schools back together for regular-season competition and then splitting up into separate playoff divisions, implementing a system that divides teams based on whether they are located in an urban or rural area or dividing teams based on their on-field success.

The proposals discussed were put together by a specially formed committee that met for more than a year and included administrators and coaches from both public and private schools. Any change would not go into effect until the next classification period, which starts with the 2017-18 school year.

Once the meeting ended, several veteran Chattanooga-area coaches said they felt like the plan to saturate the council with options was merely a tactic to frustrate them into pushing back the decision.

In what has felt like a merry-go-round debate, the proposal has come before the state's governing body on numerous occasions, only to be put off in order to study the issue. Often when the time comes to vote, there are new members of the council who request more time to study the issue, which resets the cycle. That has left a good number of coaches and administrators to openly wonder if its governing body will ever make a decision on a public-private issue that has been debated for more than two decades.

"At some point they have to listen to what the majority of their members want, and that's a complete split," Meigs County football coach Jason Fitzgerald said.

Only four states currently divide high school sports teams based along public-private lines - Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey and Tennessee.

In the TSSAA, 46 private schools compete against each other in D-II, while 23 other private schools, mostly in the smaller classifications, still compete in the public-school division and must tolerate having their enrollment multiplied by 1.8, the highest such multiplier in the nation, to do so.

Should a complete split be voted into action, it would be the third time the TSSAA has had to enforce a separation of public and private schools in the last 18 years.

"I do agree with the majority of coaches on one thing," Childress said. "It's time to make a decision."

Contact Stephen Hargis at shargis@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6293.

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