I was checking out the Friday night scores on KCCI for the boys and girls, the blowouts in the girls games was shocking, it happens in boys, but there are some girls games that I wonder if the team that is hammering the other would not be better off practicing their JV or B squad then playing a team and beating them by 50.
High School Sports Thread
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Just saw this headline and wondered, WTF? Then saw the sign and realized that it is Illinois. I can't read the article so don't know details.
Adding 16 teams per class (8 Classes) for Playoffs. Starting the Season a Week earlier.
Mixed opinions on it from the Coaches it appears:
IHSA expands state football playoffs by 128 teams, moves start of season one week earlier
The playoff expansion likely will allow all football teams with three or four wins in the nine-game regular season to make the playoffs. Previously, all five-win and some four-win teams made the field.
chicago.suntimes.com
Yes, I think they've been playing for a few years, going back at least when Audi was at Garrigan.
The problem is there are so many of these games that there wouldn't be very many varsity games. I know I've said similar things before, but the last couple years my daughter played bb the team was around .500, yet there were very few competitive games, which is crazy to think. Lots of 25+ wins and losses. I'd say almost no games where the outcome was in doubt in the 4th quarter, maybe even the second half. There are some pockets by region and class where there can be competitive games, but it's hard in girls bb to get a schedule with some decent competitive balance where the travel isn't terrible.
There are already a lot of varsity games getting cancelled, but also times where a JV game was scheduled, but the mismatch is so bad that one team will bring their Freshman/JV2 team to play, or in the case of baseball even 8th grade teams vs. JV.
Competitive balance is a major problem in HS sports in Iowa. When you have these conferences that grow, shrink and change incrementally, and you have areas of the state that are growing like crazy and a bunch of schools and towns shrinking, it's time for the state to reset this. Leaving this up to schools and conferences to make decisions is not good for the student-athlete. It's a difficult balance between travel (esp. for high volume sports like baseball and basketball) and competitive balance.
It's never going to be perfect and there always have been and will be blowouts. But for a lot of sports and conferences it's just a huge mess. Reset everything and create conferences that have some optimization between BEDS/competitiveness and travel time. I don't think a conference including 2 classes is a big deal.
Girls basketball has really changed the last two or three years.
I think we all know that's easier said than done. If making things fair and competitive is truly the end goal then promotion/relegation regardless of BEDS numbers is where this needs to go. It'll never happen but outside of ranking you by something like the RPI they use for the big schools in football I don't know how you get things back to somewhat of a competitive balance.
Take off the press in first half, and pull starters late 3rd quarter or start of the 4th. Not really fair to the starters on the winning team to not let them play in a varsity game.
I got a text from a friend last night, the school his grand daughter plays on Wayne, beat the school I retired from 64-12, and Wayne is not real good to begin with. The other school was in the sub state game 5 or 6 years ago, and now they are worse than horrible. To top it off, one family with ties to the area, left the district and their daughters were sitting on the bench for Wayne last night in street cloths, they would be two of the starters at the other school, Junior and a Freshman. They asked to open enroll, the school turned them down and they went anyway. They sit out their 90 days and the money will follow them next year, the count date has long passed this year anyway.
All you can do, but then you get a coach that doesn't care if they embarrass the other school or not, or wants to set some type of record for points scored you can get into a bad situation or two.
A first step is let's get some conferences where maybe we aren't crossing over 3 classes and 1.5 hour travel times where most of the games are complete blowouts in most sports.
It would be hard to do something that works really well. We don't need a great system. We need a not terrible system.
We're never going to have parity no matter what we do, nor should that really be the goal. A reasonable and achievable goal is to have a few more games in most sports be reasonably competitive with a travel distance that isn't horrible. We have the worst of both worlds in a bunch of conferences. As long as we are leaving it up to schools and conference members to decide this on their own, when pretty much everybody wants to be the biggest member of their conference, this is the way it's going to be. We've got too many schools that are wildly diverging in terms of growth and $ for the current system to keep up and do the right thing for kids.
- Use BEDS as the baseline, and determine whatever multipliers you want based on socioeconomics, recent success, whatever.
- Put some limits on a model, such as min/max teams in a league (say 8-12)
- Either put a limit and optimize for the other variable between a) max travel distance in the league and b) % spread in adjusted BEDS number between the largest and smallest school
First, that really isn't as complicated a problem as it seems. And second, if someone did a half-ass job of something like this, it's going to be a huge improvement for a lot of the conferences.
I thought maybe ease of open enrollment might lead to kids that are decent but not playing much on a good team open enrolling to not so good teams to play more. While it doesn't exactly create parity, it might spread the functional players out a little more.
Ultimately I think we just see more of these:
- Good players on bad teams open enrolling to good teams
- Decent players on good teams at large schools open enrolling to good teams at smaller schools
- Kids quitting or not participating
Makes sense. Seems as though it can be done similarly to how football has districts, but I know that many people really dislike letting the state have any control.
No district wants to give up its competitive advantage over the other schools in a conference. So when you have a town and district that has grown large than its conference mates, they start dominating the conference and the smaller schools get pissed off because of the disadvantage they are facing. Not really sure how you can fix that without the state becoming directly involved, which they should.
Size of the districts is what makes the SCC work so well, the largest school in the conference is really not great at most sports and therefore do not dominate. The conference is not all that far spread out, only about 100 miles travel distance between Clark to either Davis County or Cardinal, everyone else would be in-between. Its the reason the conference does not want Pella Christian to join, they would dominate way to much and throw the entire conference into unbalance.
Football districts are really tough because you have the restriction of # of teams per district due to how playoffs work and only having 8/9 regular season games. Football also has the limitation of not being able to cross over classes. Not to mention football is far and away the hardest sport to turn around a program for many reasons.
People pointing out what they don't like about football districting and thinking that means this idiotic conference set up is better are missing the point. Football is a massively harder sport to organize, and massively harder to develop a program. It would be a million times easier for a state-wide reorganization of the other sports due to massive advantages other sports have over football:
- You don't care if you cross over class designation as long as BEDS were within a certain range. Who cares if one team is a big 2A and another is a small 3A?
-You're playing 20-40 basketball/ baseball games each season, so who cares if a league has 8-12 teams? If one region and class it makes sense to have an 8 team league due to travel and BEDS criteria and another part of the state there is a 12 team league, it doesn't matter. That gives incredible flexibility that football does not have.
Looking through girls basketball scores from yesterday and saw that Roosevelt beat DSM North 70-3. This is North's second game this year where they have only scored 3 pts (lost 43-3 to Mason City).
www.gobound.com
Bound | Des Moines North Polar Bears | Girls Basketball | 2025-26
Schedules, scores, rosters, stats for the Des Moines North 2025-26 Girls Basketball.
www.gobound.com
It's a good thing North got hot.Looking through girls basketball scores from yesterday and saw that Roosevelt beat DSM North 70-3. This is North's second game this year where they have only scored 3 pts (lost 43-3 to Mason City).
Bound | Des Moines North Polar Bears | Girls Basketball | 2025-26
Schedules, scores, rosters, stats for the Des Moines North 2025-26 Girls Basketball.
