I read the article and was horrified.

Sure the Portland-area leagues would be messed up but you'd still basically be playing metro-area teams so travel wouldn't be that horrible. The real travesty would be in the rest of the state.

I grew up in Eugene and attended North Eugene. This nonsense would have Sheldon and South Eugene in 6A together with the big southern schools....Medford, Roseberg and Grants Pass and I'm not sure who else. Have these idiots ever tried to drive between Eugene and Medford in the middle of winter for a basketball game on a Tuesday evening?

It makes absolutely no sense at all to break up the Eugene/Springfield-area high schools which are all relatively equal in size. If the Eugene school district is worried that Sheldon and South are larger than Churchill and North they can solve the problem easy enough by simply moving the attendence boundaries around a bit.

This sort of 6-tier system might make more sense in California and other states that have much larger populations and much larger urban high schools than those in Oregon. But it makes no sense in Oregon. I'm currently living in Texas with my wife and Texas only goes up to 5A. Yet the big suburban high schools here are much larger than anything in Oregon. For example, Plano, a suburban city of 225,000 just north of Dallas has five mid-high schoools for grades 9-10 and three senior high schools for grades 11-12. Each senior high has between 2,600 and 3,000 students between the two grades, or about 1,400 per graduating class. Clearly those schools are bigger than anything I know of in Oregon. And yet they are still only 5A schools in Texas and play with the rest of the big schools.

No matter what your opinion is on this, we progresives have to remain silent on this. Why? Remember how we generally respond to people defending bigoted and backward behavior being defended by claims of "tradition?" We didn't allow it to be an excuse then, and as a result, we can't treat it like an excuse now. That would be hypocritical.

Saving money and more fair competition are good things. Yeah... I can relate to how you feel about losing rivalries. It's the same feeling people have when they see the Seahawks sitting in the NFC or start counting the number of universities that now play in the Big Ten Conference (11). However, Oregon school districts are too cash poor to get wrapped up in sentimentality.

afs- sorry, but i find your argument absurd. You have somehow taken decades-old rivalries and a structure which most of the state's athletic programs continue to support, and turned it in bigory and backward behavior. Can you explain to me how opposing a highly unpopular plan that was mostly supported only by the Class that won't be affected by it is hypocritical?

If you had read the article, you'd recognize that among the athletic directors who will be affected, there is far from any consensus that the changes would save money (see Kent's previous comment).

More importantly, my argument pointed out the amazingly undemocratic nature of the decision-making. The OSAA knows a vast majority of the schools oppose the process; the OSAA knows a vast majority of schools have supported an alternative, more flexible plan; yet the OSAA has chosen, because it can, to ignore all these voices. I'm sorry, but I can find no bigotry in my assertion of the importance of tradition in ensuring student interest in sportings events, alumni interest, practicality, and a host of other factors which serve to condemn the OSAA's realignment plan.

I fail to see what this has to do about saving money.

Most of the current leagues are organized around geographically compact units. Adding two new divisions will simply force each league to cover a larger geographic area to pull in 10 teams that are in the same division. The only possible exception is the Portland metro area where there are just so many schools.

But here's what I really fail to understand. If it is truly a problem that Wilson and Grant are larger than Benson and Cleveland and the rest the Portland schools then all the Portland School district has to do is move some attendance boundaries around to keep the schools more even in size.

Hello, OSAA?? Is this really the most important issue to devote time, effort, and heartache to, right now? How about spending all our energy in persuading the Legislature to fund schools so they can even have athletics? The Portland School Board attempted to cut PIL tennis for next year - that would have eliminated the number 1, 6, and 16 teams in the state from competition, period, had the coaches, parents, and students not persuaded them to reconsider. It wouldn't matter which league the State champion Grant Generals are in, if they don't even have a tennis team! How about we focus??

I'm a Wilson HS mom - my oldest played varsity football, middle plays basketball and tennis, youngest swims. One of the main reasons our kids go to Portland Public Schools, is because they're Our Schools, in Our City. The proposal completely misses the benefit of having parents, students, and staff visit the other schools within their district to play sports. The district that plays together, stays together. By talking with each other, parent spectators get a better sense of the values and challenges faced by other high schools in the district. I'm somewhat interested in having those conversations with suburban parents, but not at the expense of being able to interact with folks at Jefferson, Madison, Marshall, etc.

The two stated reasons for the reorg are to reduce travel time and make competition fairer. Kent, driving out to the burbs at rush hour is the very definition of "horrible", to me. I live in Portland partly so I don't have to do that. It's nowhere near as bad as driving from Eugene to Medford in winter, I agree, but it's also nowhere near as easy as taking the bus to Benson. And as far as being fairer - the evidence suggests otherwise. Grant and Wilson aren't winning every PIL title every year. With the PPS liberal transfer policy, school size has less to do with boundaries than with the capacity of the building, as kids can go to any school in the district. It doesn't seem reasonable to shunt Wilson and Grant off to play the big suburban schools, when the catchment pool for any Portland school is the entire city.

Amanda- you bring up a very good point that I hadn't really focused on. Money is of course a huge factor in sports funding, and the mere fact that last year the PIL thought of cutting the team that would be state champion in tennis is outrageous (disclaimer: i'm extraordinarily biased, i used to be team captain).

The larger funding issues raises the importance of looking to state money flows, and ways to find more money, such as Rick Metsger and Vicki Walker's bill that just passed in the Senate to close the loophole that has utility companies collecting taxes from consumers and then not paying the taxes to the state.

We all know that once sports programs begin to be cut, they won't come back without a great deal of hassle. Why doesn't the University of Oregon, a very rich sports program nowadays, have a baseball team? I would say in large part due to inertia; they cut the program, bringing it back is much harder than it was to first create a team.

The OSAA is picking a hell of a time to rearrange the entire state athletics system, when many school districts are unsure year to year as to the status of their funding for sports.

I'm gratified to see this issue get some space on BlueOregon, and agree with most of the comments above. This proposal is so bad for 4A (and perhaps lower classifications as well) for so many reasons, it's hard to believe it's gotten as far as it has.

Amanda, I think you really hit the nail on the head with your comment that the "district that plays together, stays together." I don't know that we can foresee all the ramifications of losing that in the PIL, the Midwestern League, the SOC, or anywhere else, but I can't think of many good ones. The sense of community developed within the context of friendly rivalries is very valuable to the schools and the greater community for reasons having nothing to do with sports, per se.

Brian, my younger son, who being a teenager knows everything, says the U of O cut baseball to comply with Title IX. No?

Amanda:

Actually, the U of O didn't cut baseball. They dropped out of PAC-10 baseball and made it a club sport. There still is a Duck baseball team. The players just don't get scholarships. See:

http://www.uoregon.edu/~duckball/html/mainpage.html

But your question brings me way back back back to when I was a teenager in Eugene and playing baseball at North Eugene. I remember when the U of O dropped out of PAC-10 baseball and as I recall it had everything to do with funding and little to do with Title IX. They were just cutting the budget and baseball was the logical place to cut athletic scholarships for several reasons. First, the Ducks basically sucked. Second, no one really cared about baseball except perhaps those who were playing it. Third, the level of competition in baseball was nowhere near that in other sports such as football, basketball, and track because most of the good high school athletes went straight into single-A minor league ball not college. So why waste scholarship money on 2nd rate baseball players?

This was way back in the pre-internet era so it's not possible to go back and search the Guard archives to find any stories. But I don't really remember it as having anything to do with Title IX.

Bottom line? There are plenty of opportunities for U of O students to play baseball if they want to. They just don't get scholarships for it anymore.

Totally disagree. Every state that has a similar population to Oregon's has more than 4 divisions in sports. EVERY ONE.

Oregon is so slow, just like our speed limit on interstates is only 65. We are wrong there, too. In Washington they go faster on rural highways. They go faster on rural freeways, they have more divisions, but it is a stupid idea in Oregon.

It is not stupid in Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, Idaho, Washington, or states of similar population - like Nebraska.

Oregon needs more divisions. It is o.k. if there is a weaker state champion in the 5A level than in the 6A level.