SC Soccer Forums SCSoccer.com Forums Girls Varsity Soccer Can or should Soccer have its own class in High School??

I would like to see High School soccer to do away with the current classes. I would like to see their be 3 divisions in Soccer with the top 20 in Div 1 next 20 in Div II and the rest in Div III. You can use the year end rankings from the previous 3 years and average them to start out with. Then update the Divisions every 5 years. I know this may cause some logistical problems but games could be combined into weekend events where you play multiple games to help with away games. The bottom line it would give HS soccer more Legitimacy and more competitivness. Players would get better playing High School becuase of the quality of play. Any thoughts or comments?

I'm all about that..That would do away with the constant bickering over running the scores up..

That would be a logistical nightmare. It is a good idea, but will never happen with travel.

Here is an idea. Get away from regions. Allow school to form conferences which they can decide (i.e. all columbia area schools could form a conference and then break up the conference based on talent level. or a charleston conference. or a york county conference. or a spartanburg,greenville conference). This would allow the better teams to play better in-conference games and weaker teams the same. Then each school would be responsible for non-region SOS. Add a round to the playoffs and let everyone in. Having an upperstate and lowerstate voting meeting to seed all of the teams and then place themselves on the bracket (aka NCAA basketball style). top team gets tope seed and bye, etc. This would also allow current regions who have 5 or 6 good teams to get everyone into the tournament and avoid the situation where a 1 seed (FM) has to play a really good 4 seed (Byrnes, Spartanburg, etc) in the first round.

Does anyone know of any other state that does this?

Ohio does. Conferences are chosen by the schools. Completely unrelated to eventual tournament region or size of school (4A and 3A can conference together). The state is then broken up into sectional of 14 to 18 teams based on division (4A, 3A although it is Div 1, 2 and 3). The coaches from each sectional get together and vote for the top 4 seeds. Those seed get to pick their spot on tournament chart. Everyone else is selected at random. Works pretty well.

Hobo's suggestion is nirvana.....but not practical. Clover at Hilton Head Island on a Tuesday night would be pretty difficult.

cid's idea is better. Conferences should be based on geography with some consideration for school size.

In South Jersey they have a Coaches Cup, which is very similar to the FA Cup. Single-elimination tournament runs throughout a good bit of the season. No regard for school size, sort of like the TB Viking Cup. We could do it here if we scheduled the games on Saturday so as not to conflict with the regular season and allow for travel (Clover @ HHI).

AAAHHHH, Hurst longing for yester-year of old. Hurst do you remember the NJ tournament of champions as well?

Yes I do Joe.

My high school team was never good enough to participate.

I agree with HOBO 110%. Our high school league games are like watching paint dry.