The audible ringing of aye and a smattering of drying ink accomplished what few member schools of the West Virginia Secondary Schools Activities Commission could not— end the dominance of private schools at the Class A level for West Virginia high school basketball.
The SSAC released its updated classification listings for the 2020-21 basketball season earlier this week.
That season will be the first of a two-season pilot program that splits the member schools into four classes for the first time in state history.
Six of the eight private schools were bumped from Class A to AA. Two could have been bumped up to AAA if not for a rule barring any team from having to jump two classifications.
Oak Hill is making the jump from AA this season to AAAA, but that’s because the new numbers released have Oak Hill moving to AAA in all other sports to start next school year. Weirton Madonna and Greater Beckley Christian will remain as the last bastions of private schools competing in Class A.
The move was made in the name of competitive balance.
That need for balance likely stems from the dominance of private schools, and Catholic schools in particular for the better part of the last three decades. On the boys’ side, public schools have won the title four times since 2000, including defending champion Webster County. The other three were Williams in 2001, Tug Valley in 2013 and Magnolia in 2015. Only in ’01, when Williamson beat Oceana, did a private school not make it the final.
The girls’ side is even more of a stranglehold.
From 1990, when Burch beat Montcalm 52-48, until last season, only three public schools have won the A championship. Williamstown claimed the title in 2003, and Gilmer County did the same in 2016. Huntington St. Joe’s has been in every title game since 2008 and has nine wins during that span.
Balance was the charge the competition committee was tasked with earlier this year.
“It was hard, speaking on behalf of the private schools was a tough,” said Wheeling Central Athletic Director Donnie Murray, a member of the competition committee. “The dynamics for say Wheeling and Clarksburg are all different. It’s hard to speak on behalf of all eight of those schools, but I did so based on what I felt and knew about each.”
Murray noted he gained some perspective recently while accompanying the Maroon Knights’ football team on its “tour” of West Virginia during the postseason. He remarked on how gracious and hospitable the other schools were and that the challenges that citizens faced in Wayne or Pendleton counties mirror those faced in Wheeling.
Being in a larger city like Wheeling, the Maroon Knights have access to facilities and individualized training that others in the state might not. Murray, though, was quick to comment unequivocally on the perceived advantage Central Catholic and other private schools are believed to possess.
“I’ll go 100 percent on the record when I say that we don’t actively go out and seek kids to bolster our program.” Murray said. “We focus on making these kids the best at whatever they want to be and prepare them for the next step.”
The committee recommended a score-based ranking system with 70 percent of a school’s score coming from enrollment figures, 20 percent from the school’s proximity to a city or county seat, and 10 percent of the economic position of both the district and its students. The SSAC’s Board of Control passed the measure 111-26. The state board of education later approved the move, 7-2.
Unless Madonna and GBC both advance to the championship game, a new public-school participant and potentially champion is assured in Class A. Competitive balance may be the touted reason for the move, but there are some who are willing to point out the underlying motives.
“That was the whole idea for this,” a retired Larry Weekley, the longtime coach and athletic director at Valley-Wetzel High School said about the belief from small that the private schools were the target of this balancing. “Nobody complains about (Clarksburg) Notre Dame, or (Morgantown) Trinity. It’s not even about Catholic schools. There’s always been this vendetta about (Wheeling) Central.”
The Central boys have won eight championships since 2002, including four in a row from 02-05. Charleston Catholic has four during that span. St. Joe is the boogeyman on the girls’ side. Central’s girls have three titles since 2004, and Parkersburg Catholic two.
Weekley knows a thing or two about winning, totaling 404 victories in his career against 298 losses. His teams reached the regional final five or six times, but never made it to Charleston. In all but one of those years, the Lumberjills’ season ended at the hands of the Maroon Knights.
“I had some teams that could have made it, but we had to go through Central,” Weekley said. “(Wheeling Central coach) Penn (Kurtz) and I talked, and he told me two or three times that we had the second-best team in the state. We had a better team than anyone they faced at the tournament. It was what it was.
“But at first, I didn’t think it would be a good idea, this move. Under this system, as you look at it thoroughly, it does give more kids a chance to go to the state basketball tournament,” he continued. “Now, does it water it down? That’s another question; but it does give more kids and opportunity and that’s what we’re in the business for.”
One proponent of the move was St. Mary’s girls coach Howie Meeks, whose Blue Devils lost in the title game to St. Joe’s four times in 2010, ‘11, ‘13 and ‘14. But once the new enrollment figures were released and the updated class structure announced, St. Mary’s also will be bumped up to Class AA.
Tom Hart is the current boys and former girls coach at Cameron High School. Like Weekley, Hart had a few quality teams meet an early exit at the hands of the Maroon Knights.
But Hart feels the overall solution lies down a different path. He referenced the boys tournament in 2015. Region One, Section One had four of the top 10 teams in the boys field in Magnolia (1), Wheeling Central (2), Bishop Donahue (4) and Cameron (10). Magnolia and Central both advanced from the sectional and eventually met in the title game.
Hart feels a top-to-bottom seeding to start the postseason would eliminate that very situation.
“What I would like to see is (for them) to do away with the sectional and regional alignments and seed the teams from top to bottom,” Hart admitted. “Everyone is concerned about travel, but if you look at the schedules, they’re already traveling all over the state for regular season games.”
He did note that an earlier form of the proposal that would have broken teams up into large and small urban and large and small rural may had a better distribution. But as for the current state of things, Hart and his players are focused on this year’s tournament and trying to fight yet again through a difficult section.
There are many who are applauding this change and just as many against it and that is why it’s a two-year pilot program and its only being implemented in one sport. WVSSAC Executive Director Bernie Dolan has mentioned on numerous occasions that if it doesn’t work, the SSAC can simply go back to the previous system using the current classification numbers for a three-class system.
