We’re Not Alone

The football coach of this small, rural public high school consistently wins at least 90% of his regular-season games. Just as consistently, his season ends with a loss to a parochial school in the playoffs.

“Most of my linemen are barely 200 pounds and some are not even that big,” he said. “We’re going up against a team with 6-foot-5, 300-pound guys who are being recruited by Ohio State. The right tackle and the right guard live 60 miles apart.

“Now, I have nothing against their religion or their school, but to play the public school next door that has a five-mile district radius, doesn’t seem fair.”

Jim France is not talking about Mater Dei, Santa Margarita or Servite. France, coach of Akron Manchester High, is discussing a Catholic football power in Cleveland. But it seems France’s concerns are no different than those of many public school administrators across the country. They want a level playing field for private and public schools, or entirely different playing fields.

In the Southern Section, public school principals, coaches and parents have long complained that private schools have an unfair advantage on the athletic field because of their ability to attract students from everywhere. The current Orange County principals’ league realignment proposal for this fall would leave Santa Margarita and Mater Dei--the area’s two biggest private schools--out of league title competition during the next two regular seasons but invite them back into the mix for postseason play.

But private school administrators contend that separate leagues or playoff divisions would be a logistical nightmare.

“I don’t think separate divisions would work here,” Mater Dei Principal Patrick Murphy said. “Schools are so spread out. An all-Orange County Catholic league doesn’t work because there are only four Catholic schools of any size, so we’d have to do a lot of traveling to add more teams into the league.”

Murphy says none of these issues would even be on the table if Mater Dei were not a traditional contender for league and section titles.

“If Mater Dei High was [an average athletic] program, this wouldn’t even be an issue,” Murphy said.

Still, it appears to be a pervading issue here as well as throughout the country. In other states, more extreme measures have either been taken or attempted. Tennessee recently tried to create separate divisions for private and public schools. Other states, such as Texas and New Jersey, have separate section and state playoffs for public and private schools.

Ohio and Missouri recently came close to splitting public and nonpublic school championships, but both proposals failed by nearly 2-1 margins.

Wisconsin might be the only state heading in the other direction. Beginning in 2000, Wisconsin’s public and private schools will belong to the same athletic association for the first time. However, the two associations merged largely because the number of private schools had decreased so much that the importance of private school state championships diminished each year.

In California’s Central Coast Section, which covers 111 schools in the southern San Francisco Bay area, there is increasing tension between public and private schools, especially in girls’ sports. Boys’ private schools have always played in their own league--the West Catholic Athletic League, but girls’ teams at private schools compete in leagues with public schools. Central Coast Commissioner Nancy Blaser said there is a growing sentiment to place girls’ private schools in their own league.

In Ohio, where high school football state championships are taken very seriously, parochial schools usually dominate in the state playoffs. Cleveland St. Ignatius, which produces many Division I college players each year, won seven Division I--large school--state championships over an eight-year period beginning in 1988. Manchester High didn’t have to face Ignatius in the postseason, but it did play other parochial powerhouses such as Cleveland Benedictine, Youngstown Mooney and Youngstown Ursuline.

Five years ago, France decided he couldn’t take it anymore. So France and Manchester’s superintendent, Marco Burnette, decided they’d try to restructure the football playoff system in hopes of creating a separate division for private schools. France and Burnette gathered enough support through a petition drive to force the Ohio High School Athletic Assn. (OHSAA) to put the referendum on a ballot. The proposal failed in October of 1993 by a vote of 482-240, but the margin was much closer than expected and considerably tighter than a similar vote held in 1978.

“We really shook them up,” Burnette said.

So much so that Burnette and France began to receive hate mail and threatening phone calls. France and Burnette believe the vote would have been even closer or the measure might have passed had several principals not succumbed to the same kinds of pressure that were applied to them.

“I was disappointed that 24 of my fellow principals didn’t even vote,” said France, also the principal at Manchester. “When guys are talking on the phone or at clinics, they will tell you the system is unfair. But when somebody from the newspaper calls or they’re asked to speak publicly, they change their tune.”

Burnette added: “I have been in this for 30 years and in all that time, I have not talked to one person in the public schools that thought the current system was fair. But getting people to vote it down is much different.”

Burnette said he understands why some private schools want to succeed on the athletic field and he doesn’t blame them for doing so. However, he’d rather they had their success against other private schools.

“Nonpublic schools have used this athletic thing as a positive for years,” Burnette said. “They’ve used athletic success as a marketing tool for their academic programs and to attract students. They’ve found a niche and they have taken good advantage of it.”

The vote in Ohio did convince Clair Muscaro, executive director of the OHSAA, to form a committee made up of superintendents and athletic directors from public and private schools throughout Ohio. In early 1994, the committee discussed various new systems, including one that would force private schools to move up one division in the football playoffs, but nothing was ever settled.

The committee was supposed to reconvene in two years, but it never did. Muscaro said there is no point in revisiting the issue.

“It’s a challenge to play against the top schools,” Muscaro said. “If you’re going to be a state champion, you have to beat the best. These schools compete against each other in league. What’s so different about playing them in the regular season?”

Muscaro said the push for a separate private school division in the Ohio state football playoffs has died down now that public schools--Lima Senior and Canton McKinley--have won the last two Division I state titles. In the Division IV playoffs, Manchester upset parochial schools Canton Central Catholic and Benedictine, then lost in the final to public Germantown Valley View in five overtimes.

“We played our best game of the season against Benedictine,” France said. “That’s not going to happen every year. We’re going to rebuild and they’re going to reload.”

In Tennessee, private school Brentwood Academy dominated sports other than football for years. But once Brentwood began winning state football championships, public schools took notice and eventually forced the state athletic association to create separate postseason tournaments for all sports beginning this school year.

“The ball had been rolling a little bit anyway,” said Randy Taft, communications director for Tennessee’s athletic association. “There was a growing disenchantment in the public schools that financial aid schools were given was being used to recruit athletes. Once Brentwood won back-to-back 5-A football titles, people starting saying, ‘They must be doing something wrong if we can’t beat them.’ ”

Ronnie Carter, executive director of Tennessee’s athletic association, said separate divisions will not solve the problem, but he hopes it will appease the public schools.

“This only says, ‘That’s all right, you can go on doing whatever you want, but come tournament time, I don’t have to play you,’ ” Carter said.

In Missouri, there weren’t enough votes this year to split public and private schools into separate tournaments, but a compromise was reached. The geographic attendance district for private schools was reduced from a 40-mile radius to 25 miles.

That sort of compromise would appease Tustin Athletic Director Al Rosmino, who has been an outspoken critic of the current CIF system.

“Unless the private schools can work within the confines of restricted eligibility, it’s not a fair system,” Rosmino said. “The public schools just can’t compete. If Catholic schools would agree to a boundary of so many parishes within a five- to seven-mile radius that they could draw from. . . . But they wouldn’t commit to that because not all of them take just Catholic kids.”

Rosmino has taught in public and private schools and doesn’t like the hand his public school is being dealt. Tustin lost to Servite in last year’s Division V football semifinals and to Santa Margarita in this year’s championship game.

“There’s no doubt we would be section champions if not for Santa Margarita,” he said. “What are we, the No. 1 public school in the county if you take away Mater Dei and Santa Margarita?”

Blaser of the Central Coast Section said the drive to be the best is exacerbating an already tense relationship between public and private schools.

“Is it all about winning?” Blaser said. “Everybody wants to win, so they have to have their own division. We’ve lost perspective. We spend an awful lot of time worrying about who the four winning teams are going to be among 110 schools. What about the other 95% percent of the season?”