New alignment idea seeks to find equity among classifications

CHSAA’s All-School Summit began on Thursday. (Ryan Casey/CHSAANow.com

LONE TREE — The classification system in Colorado seems headed for a change.

It’s not quite drastic, but the direction CHSAA’s Classification and League Organizing Committee (CLOC) is headed is definitely different than the current system. In short, CLOC’s idea would give each sport unique enrollment cutoffs which would then be used to divide classifications evenly.

Currently, all sports — save for football and wrestling — use one set of enrollment cutoffs to determine classifications. And those cutoffs are based upon basketball, the sport with the highest participation among CHSAA member schools.

The new approach was first presented to the membership at CHSAA’s All-School Summit on Thursday afternoon at the Denver Marriott South.

“It’s a philosophical thing right now,” Randy Holmen, CLOC’s chair and the principal at Holly High School, said at the CHSAA office on Wednesday ahead of the Summit.

And so CLOC is seeking feedback from the membership over the next few months. Still, make no mistake, CLOC seems intent on heading this direction for the next two-year cycle (2016-18).

“This was discussed pretty seriously,” Holmen said.

The idea was first hatched at CLOC’s most recent meeting in May. One month earlier, wrestling’s move to unique enrollment numbers was approved at the Legislative Council meeting. Wrestling wanted to create an even split of teams across its classifications.

This spawned a discussion at CLOC’s May meeting, which soon turned to the question of equity among the classification system as a whole.

“The CLOC committee was very open to this” new idea, Holmen said. “Actually, we were really excited to look into it.”

Randy Holmen explains the new alignment idea at the All-School Summit on Thursday. (Ryan Casey/CHSAANow.com

The current system has been in place for nearly 20 years. It seeks to keep the higher and lower cutoffs of a classification’s enrollment figures right around a ratio of 2.2 to 1.

“We’ve struggled for a couple of years now of how to have equity in our classification system,” said Paul Angelico, CHSAA’s commissioner. “There is no perfect way to find equity, but our current system may actually work against equity.”

So, how to find equity? Like wrestling did, CLOC wants to have an even amount of teams playing in classifications — in each sport.

Every sport would have different enrollment cutoffs for classifications in order to balance the teams. In some cases, schools would have teams playing in different classifications.

However, the change isn’t all that drastic. Early projections have shown that 10-12 schools would be affected at the very maximum in certain sports.

“We don’t envision this to be a landslide change in any classification,” Holmen said. “It can’t be. It won’t be.”

CLOC’s next meeting is in November. It is there that the committee will set the structure to be used for the 2016-18 two-year cycle, so any feedback from schools needs to come prior to that meeting.

“Please be active in this,” Homen told the gathered athletic directors on Thursday, “because there are going to be some tough decisions to be made.”

Implementing the new idea wouldn’t require a bylaw change, but it would require the Legislative Council to approve the CLOC report at its meeting in January 2015.

Many details remain to be ironed out — for example, how would play-up and play-down requests be handled? — but those things are likely to be hammered out at CLOC’s November meeting.

“There are going to be some real hard questions we’re going to have to answer,” Angelico said.

Under the new plan, wrestling and football’s enrollment cutoffs would not change as they are already unique.

New classification cutoff

Below are projected cutoffs for CLOC’s idea of evening out teams among classifications. This chart includes data on teams in each classification for the 2014-16 cycle, as well as the projected number of even teams in a given sport.

For sake of comparison, the current 2014-16 enrollment cutoffs are included, as well.