This past school year, the Ohio High School Athletic Association made a major decision to expand the number of divisions in almost every high school sport.
The idea behind the move was to afford more school sports programs with an opportunity to experience success in winning not only state titles, but also to capture elusive district titles that many schools have never experienced.
One other major factor involved in the decision was to create a better opportunity for the small Division I schools that rarely had a chance to win a state title.
Everything from baseball and softball to volleyball saw the divisions increase from four to seven while sports like track and field went to five divisions, cross country added one more to go to four, and other sports saw growth in the number of divisions.
In short the OHSAA expanded its divisions to create a more competitive balance while at the same time addressing growing enrollment gaps. The hope also was to incorporate competitive balance factors like open enrollment and recruiting as those issues become even more relevant, and just as importantly, the OHSAA hoped to expand opportunities for schools and student-athletes to participate in postseason play.
According to Tim Stried, director of media relations for OHSAA, the experiment to fulfill all of those scenarios this past school year did exactly what the OHSAA had hoped would occur.
Stried said the OHSAA had been looking into expansion even prior to the pandemic. He said the football expansion in 2013 has paid dividends, although a new move heading into the upcoming fall football season will see the organization tinker with the playoff format, moving from 16 regional playoff qualifiers down to a dozen.
“That really set in motion the discussion for expansion in other sports,” Stried said. “I think expansion would have taken place sooner had not the pandemic delayed it.”
One of the positives according to Stried has been seeing more teams advance to regional and state competition that had not experienced that joy before.
Stried said they received many letters from school district leaders thanking them for giving them the opportunity to compete on a more balanced level of competition.
Perhaps nowhere was that more evident than for schools like Wooster and Ashland, who at one time languished as the smallest schools in Div. I that could in no way compete with the numerous Div. I juggernauts that competed for state titles on an annual basis.
“Those are the schools we’ve heard positive comments from the most,” Stried said. “We have 818 high schools in Ohio, and we have seven state champions. There are a lot of states with fewer schools with more divisions, not that we based our decision on that.”
One fallacy that has circulated has been the OHSAA did this as a money grab coming on the heels of the pandemic.
Stried said while expansion has created more income, it also has created more expenses, and the overall financial picture after this first year of trying expansion is it came out almost identical as to prior years.
“In looking at the financials, it’s been neutral for us. Our staff has certainly had more work. It’s a lot more work, and I want to be quick to thank our member schools that host tournaments,” Stried said. “We rely heavily on these schools to host tournaments, from sectionals, to districts, to regionals. When we announced we were expanding, I had some reservations on how we would pull it off, but we did it, and thanks to the many partnerships with the schools, we were excited with the way it played out. It went better than we had hoped.”
Stried said one thing people don’t realize is the OHSAA provides travel reimbursements to schools that make it to regional and state tournaments. Each team that made it to the state tournament received $1,500 per game in reimbursements.
“A lot of people don’t know that,” Stried said. “It costs a lot of money to operate a state tournament. Expanding the number of divisions doesn’t equate to additional income for us.”
Stried said the schools making deeper tournament runs were elated, and it has created an exciting aura for both those schools and their respective communities.
He said deeper tournament runs do so much to bring communities together, and in promoting more of that, it became one of the biggest positives of expansion.
He said while it’s neat to rest on those types of laurels, there are drawbacks. He said one area of concern is it created more travel for schools, something that was a result of having fewer divisions in each district.
He said it also eliminated some of the state’s sectional tournaments, and Stried said there are many regions where winning a sectional title was a big deal.
With expansion year one now in the books, Stried said they will continue to tweak things to make them better.
One major scenario is creating a venue that can create a one-weekend state tournament.
This past year saw the state semifinals in basketball held the weekend prior to the state finals, something Stried said they found fans didn’t like.
In softball all games were played in one weekend in Akron, and in baseball the OHSAA utilized the parks at both Canal Park and Thurman Munson Stadium to ensure a single-weekend state venue for fans.
In adjusting to that idea, the OHSAA has added Wright State University into the basketball equation, adding it to Dayton Arena to return the state semifinals to the state finals weekend.
“We tried that with basketball; it didn’t work, so we found a way to return to the more traditional basketball state tournament like before,” Stried said. “We’ve learned a lot. We will continue to learn and work toward making things the best they can be because in the end it’s about the student-athletes, the schools and their communities.”
