The Portland Interscholastic League (PIL), the governing body for high school sports in Portland Public Schools, recently released their plan to move all Portland high schools into the 6A category. This represents a change from the existing system which has schools competing at the 5A or 6A level depending on enrollment and level of competition.
Although the PIL plan has met little resistance from the Oregon Scholastic Athletic Association (OSAA) or from the public at large, there are a few details of the plan that need to be scrutinized to determine whether or not the plan truly addresses the issues of equity and competition that it purports to address.
The revised PIL will do little to change the schedules of Grant and Lincoln (who are the only PIL teams competing at the 6A level), other than offer them a few more fairly easy wins. For teams currently competing in 5A, the change of division will represent a major increase in competition. In theory, that would be a great challenge for teams, but in practice, it could prove to be humiliating and overwhelming for others. Benson, for example, was winless last year in football. Jefferson narrowly avoided going winless by winning the last game of the season (against Benson). While the switch to 6A will mean less traveling for poor football programs to lose badly (Benson dropped a game to Hermiston after driving five hours to get there), it may mean getting beaten worse in front of a larger home audience.
For football, a high resource sport (think about pads, coaches, camps, transportation), there are great disparities between high school programs. Some schools’ sidelines could be mistaken for the junior college level. Others could be mistaken for a mediocre middle school team. Lumping struggling 5A programs in with such powerhouses as Central Catholic, Jesuit and Sunset will only highlight the vast inequality that exists between schools with deep-pocketed boosters and fundraisers, and those without.
The PIL hopes some of these problems can be solved by shoring up the feeder teams (freshman and junior varsity levels) to create competitive varsity squads. They’ve even gone so far as hinting that programs that can’t establish reliable feeders may end up merging with other schools to meet that need. That could end with a scenario where Jefferson and Benson, traditional PIL rivals, might merge their programs, thus eliminating one of the rivalries the reorganization is seeking to preserve.
Beyond the loss of competition, though, this could also mean the loss of teams for some schools. For some schools, the loss of a major sports program, like football, could be a death blow. For many students, especially those who struggle to connect in the classroom, athletics provides a source of engagement with school and can be a great source of personal achievement. Further, sports teams help provide schools with cohesion, identity and are a major source of school spirit, even if they can’t break .500.
Football is the extreme case through which we can examine the PIL reshuffle. The reorganization probably won’t have as big of an impact on other sports (cross country, volleyball, tennis), and in some cases it may allow athletes who play sports not offered at all schools (swim team, golf, lacrosse) more opportunity to join another school’s team. By looking at football, though, we’re able to see the subtler trends written large. Namely, PIL’s willingness to tinker with the athletic departments of seven PPS high schools (currently making up the 5A PIL division) in order to meet the needs of two schools wanting to continue competing at 6A (Lincoln and Grant who make up the oddly lonely “Special District”). If they were truly after competition and equity, they would offer Grant and Lincoln the opportunity to shift down and join the existing 5A PIL, where the rest of the district competes.
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