I think you are getting caught up in labels.
Instead of D7, we'll call it "non-qualifiers".
Schools that have not fielded competitive teams in a long time from all 4 current divisions. This could be for all sports. These schools would work hard to compete against like opponents without having to worry about getting waxed by an average team. I watch it in alot of sports. It is not good for the OHSAA as a whole. With baseball and softball season starting now, I would rather a school that frequently has 10 novice players drop down to the non-qualifiers and work toward building their program rather than get bludgeoned by 20-30 runs.
What you’re describing is noble, and I agree with the principle. The concept of a postseason geared toward that level of competition really should thought of as being
consolation, however.
The problem you’re describing is partly a consequence of the OHSAA half-[blank]ing the mandatory minimum sports concept. “We don’t want schools to only have basketball programs” is a great rule when you’re not the one at a cash-strapped school with no local baseball activity that has to work the ends of the earth to put on a baseball and softball program with kids who have never worn a glove in their life. There isn’t a purpose behind that weird rule if the organization mandating it for postseason eligibility purposes in other sports isn’t going to sponsor, or help form, something worth playing for (or at least provide efficacy to the idea that this is worth building institutional support for in the city.)
Now, I don’t know if that necessarily means all of the sudden John Marshall baseball ought to have an unusually specific pathway to being crowned a ‘state champion’… since state champion confers something that masses were in competition for. Consolation tournament winner? Sure.
Expanding the divisions is the perfect time to make this change. No small school would be hurt by this change. In fact, the path is even easier now for the small schools with less teams in each division. Neither Fort Loramie nor Russia would have to worry about playing Troy as Troy is in a much larger division.
The post of yours was in reply to a comment about promotion/relegation. The promotion/relegation concept at its core is if a team competes at the lowest ladder, and does well enough, they can conceivably just keep climbing the ladder if they continue to do well enough and they meet one of three ends on that ascension: 1) they somehow reach the top ladder of competition, and stay there; 2) they plateau within the higher level of competition but don’t perform poorly enough to revert back to the lower ladder, 3) they just keep alternating between ladders of competition because they’re too good for the lowest and not good enough to sustain their constant promotion back into the higher ladder.
That’s the point I’m getting at. Promotion/relegation doesn’t square well with the 7 division concept because the larger schools are almost always going to have the more competitive baseline vis-a-vis the smaller school. A program like Troy or Piqua could easily vacillate between a hypothetical D2, D3 and D4 in as many years time (3 years), with greater volatility toward improvement in a shorter amount of time, and have a higher competitive floor in D4 than the village 20 minutes away that is deemed too good to play in D5 & D6. That’s where I take objection with the idea we shouldn’t have the smallest schools in D7 — our entire tournament structure is based on the principle that larger schools should not be able to platoon their way through schools that have far less depth potential. And if an aim behind a state tournament and its publicity is to involve public support, it’s best to keep the consistent standard of school size instead of trying to reinvent the wheel with some complicated and confusing structure of “school ‘Y’ with 55 boys is facing off against school ‘Z’ with 210 boys in this division because ‘Z’ can’t hang with similar sized schools.”
I'm hoping you will look at this from a different perspective and see how demoralizing it is for some schools. Without naming them, these schools need a major overhaul to be competitive. Being destroyed every game because their enrollment happens to be fairly large while their skill set in a sport is extremely low.
I get it. It should be a priority. But it shouldn’t be a priority to where we’re muzzling up tournament conventions, at the expense of good programs who face similarly-difficult levels of limitations (due to their school size) in given sports. Do 7 divisions and a separate consolation— but anything more (like 6 divisions and a separate consolation) would just be prioritizing (if not rewarding) the lowest common denominator.
statelinesportsnetwork.net
