Shortcoming in the System, Part 2: The competitive death sentence

Get caught up. Read part 1.

Competitiveness is a concern in Wyoming’s Class 3A more than any other classification.

Consistently, the smallest schools in Class 3A have little to no hope of competing for state championships. In fact, schools ranked in spots 25 through 28 in enrollment in the past five-plus years haven’t won a single state championship in any sport except football (which uses five classes).

Mountain View, Newcastle, Thermopolis, Lyman, Glenrock and Lovell — the six schools that have alternately occupied the bottom four spots in the 16-school Class 3A since the 2010-11 school year — have won a combined zero state titles at the 3A level in that span.

However, 3A’s four largest schools (Jackson, Star Valley, Cody and Douglas) have won 45 3A titles in those five-and-a-half years. And that doesn’t even count football titles or Jackson’s numerous all-class championships in alpine and Nordic skiing.

The only class that measures up similarly is 1A, where the bottom quarter of schools have also been held without a non-football state title since 2010-11. However, some of those schools, like Glendo and Chugwater, are so small that they don’t field varsity programs for many sports.

The bottom quarter of schools in 4A and 2A have won 6.1 percent and 7.7 percent, respectively, of those classifications’ state non-football championships in that same span. Those numbers are well above 3A’s 0.0 percent.

Bottom 25 percent in 3A: 0 non-football titles
Bottom 25 percent in 4A: 6 non-football titles (6.1 percent) (not counting 3A schools like Jackson that have won all-class titles in sports like Nordic or alpine skiing).
Bottom 25 percent in 2A: 4 non-football titles (7.7 percent)
Bottom 25 percent in 1A: 0 non-football titles

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The struggles for competitiveness in 3A go beyond just the bottom four schools.

The eight smallest schools, or the schools in the bottom half, of 3A have won just 11 of the 76 non-football 3A titles awarded since the 2010-11 school year. That means the bottom half of schools in the 3A class have won just 14.4 percent of the 3A state titles — the lowest percentage of any of Wyoming’s four classifications.

Comparatively, in other classifications, those figures are much higher.

In 4A, the bottom half of schools in enrollment have won 31.6 percent of the non-football titles (again not counting 3A schools like Jackson that have won all-class titles in sports like Nordic skiing or alpine skiing — which, if included, would make that percentage even higher).

In 2A, the bottom half of schools in enrollment have won 21.2 percent of non-football titles.

In 1A, the bottom half of schools in enrollment have won 33.3 percent of non-football titles (Snake River, which is at the midpoint of the 1A rankings, was placed in the bottom half to account for schools like Chugwater and Glendo that don’t consistently field varsity programs for many sports.)

Clearly, in 3A, the smallest schools in the classification have the toughest time winning state championships, and 3A’s rates are significantly worse than other classifications.

Something is wrong.

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The 3A struggles are more pronounced in some sports than others. In four of the 14 sports offered at the 3A level (excluding football), the eight smallest schools have been shut out of  state championships for more than a decade. For example, the last bottom-half team to win the boys track and field title was Torrington in 2002; the last bottom-half team to win the girls swimming title was Newcastle in 2002; the last bottom-half team to win the boys swimming title was Lyman in 1990. A team in the bottom half of 3A has never won a girls cross country title.

Class 4A, conversely, doesn’t have that problem. The longest bottom-half drought in the 22 4A (or one-class) sports is in boys track and field, which hasn’t been one by a bottom-half team since Laramie in 1996; girls swimming hasn’t had a bottom-half winner since Laramie in 2001; wrestling hasn’t had a bottom-half winner (or any winner but Gillette) since Green River in 2002. However, 17 of 4A’s 22 sports have had at least one bottom-half winner since 2010.

And in 2A and 1A, the biggest gaps are in 2A girls basketball (no bottom-half champions since Lusk in 1999), 1A boys track (no bottom-half champs since Farson in 1998) and 1A girls track (no bottom-half champs since Albin in 2003). They are the only three of the 15 sports offered at the 2A and 1A levels haven’t had at least one bottom-half champion since 2006.

Football, too, has no such problems. In fact, in the past six seasons, schools in the bottom half of their classifications in enrollment have won 13 of the 30 titles (43 percent) — twice in 4A (Sheridan), three times in 3A (Powell), once at 2A (Big Horn), five times at 1A 11-man (Cokeville and Southeast) and twice in 1A six-man (Kaycee and Meeteetse).

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But competitiveness isn’t just about championships. Right now, those bottom quarter of schools in 3A are struggling just to keep up. Just look at the 2014-15 school year’s culminating events to see how the bottom four schools in Class 3A in terms of enrollment (Newcastle, Mountain View, Glenrock and Lovell) fared at the state level. It wasn’t pretty.

The best finish was the Mountain View girls’ second-place finish in volleyball and the Lovell girls’ second-place finish in girls basketball. Mountain View’s girls also finished third in girls basketball and sixth in boys cross country; Lovell’s boys finished fifth in track and field; and Newcastle’s girls finished sixth in girls swimming. No other teams in the bottom quarter of 3A finished higher than sixth. For golf, soccer and swimming, at least three of the four schools didn’t even field teams in those sports.

So far in 2015-16, the highest finish for a bottom-four school in 3A is Mountain View’s second-place finish in volleyball. No other bottom-four team has finished higher than fifth at state so far this year in any other sport.

The problem of 3A isn’t a problem tied to the competitiveness of the individual schools, either. Schools at the bottom of 3A have proven they know how to win when given the chance in 2A. The six schools alternately holding down the bottom four spots in 3A the past five and a half years (Glenrock, Lovell, Thermopolis, Lyman, Mountain View and Newcastle) have combined to win 14 state championships at the 2A level since the 2010-11 school year. (And Glenrock and Newcastle have both been 3A all that time.)

And therein might be the key to a solution.

Part 3, tomorrow: A potential solution to the biggest problem in Wyoming’s high school sports’ classification system.

–patrick