I think you need to be more specific about your attendance zone comment TabVermes. What's the attendance zone of a public magnet school? Is that unfair too? What about No Child Left Behind? Is that included in your attendance zone definition? What about public charter schools that allow cross county attendance? How do you define the public school attendance zone? Is your definition the same as the district policy or federal law? I believe the concept of school choice is going to continue to expand and change the landscape of the public school system.
I understand that the issue of a multiplier has been raised at the high school league previously and voted down. You may not like that but it is not a reason to say that BE has won unfairly.
Do parents feel badly that we have beaten a competitive team like Waccamaw before? All of the semi-finals and finals in the last few years in 2A have been VERY competitive games that could have gone either way. Would you be asking this if Waccamaw or Woodruff had won? Of course we don't feel badly that we are playing in a league by consent with other teams who also consented and we won.
There are more variables than attendance zone that play into this discussion. They have all been raised and discussed repeatedly. These include "rich" schools v "poor" schools and schools with club feeders v schools with none. Are those variables unfair? Should you make provisions for those in the classifications? Of course the current league system includes all sports, not just soccer. I doubt that the original founders of the high school league could have imagined the change in youth sports over the last 15-20 years with the advent of off season clubs, paid training, etc. And by the way, BE was in AAA in the past (when I went to school in the olden days).
Given the disparity between sports at any given school maybe a state-wide league for each sport is a good idea. I generally agree with others that a ranking system similar to club might work although I'm certain there would be complaints about who ranks and how they rank. I also favor a tournament format for the championship. (Can you imagine what baseball would do if they couldn't play a 100 games before they decided who won!:D)
I think it's interesting that you suggest removing competitive games in 2A for the benefit of "public" schools because there are so few of them. I don't know if you're associated with a 2A school or not but if so would your players feel good about never having a competitive game and taking home the championship? It would have certainly been a boring road not to have Waccamaw to challenge us at the end of the year. Based on the Waccamaw coach's comments in the paper, they WANTED to play us. And before anyone starts screaming, yes, AM stepped up and challenged us this year.
