Even when the PIAA does --- or attempts to do --- the right thing, it really proves just how archaic, dated and headed toward unnecessary it is.
The latest example is this nonsense I read in a very well-written piece by the Post-Gazette’s preps sports guy Mike White who, incidentally, I think has been covering high school sports since Jim Thorpe was a student/athlete at Carlisle Indian Industrial School and was running roughshod all over would-be tacklers in the center of the state.
Anyhow, back to the current-day PIAA…
Earlier this week the governing body made it illegal (by a 29-0 vote) to participate in a “redshirt” just before high school --- that is to say, repeating eighth grade for the sole purpose of having an advantage athletically once a kid got to high school.
What didn’t the PIAA do though? They didn’t make it a penalty to repeat sixth or seventh grade for the same express purpose.
So there you go; there is your workaround.
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That is exactly what these maniacal parents will start doing with their kids as the parents are blinded by often-times false hopes, dreams and expectations that doing a grade twice will translate into their kid becoming some gigantic Division I scholarship athlete.
The PIAA got this half-right. They got the eighth-grade part right, but why not slide in and have full jurisdiction over someone pulling this move in any middle school grade? I don’t get it. Make it fully right or, honestly, don’t waste our time giving us the impression you truly want to fix things.
But in all of this, it really exposes a much bigger issue anyway. Is the PIAA needed in anything but football for any athlete who is moderately competitive to truly advanced? It says here that it really isn’t.
Think about this --- the logistics, costs, liability, insurance, etc. of football (along with there really not being any full-contact AAU leagues) merits that they pretty much must fall under the purview of the PIAA.
But other than that, can’t you see a world where the PIAA sports become nothing more than intramural-level competition wherein the team from the school just travels and plays other schools of intramural-level athletes? I know I can.
Think about basketball or baseball or softball or soccer. Or think about wrestling or lacrosse or volleyball.
If you are a moderately to highly successful athlete of high school age, where is the best competition? It is on the AAU circuit. It is with your club team. It is on your travel and the teams your travel team plays against. That’s where college coaches put their focus in recruiting, that’s where the best games are.
Know why? Because the not moderately to highly successful kids are weeded out. That’s just the full-on reality of the situation.
The forced marriage between academics and athletics we have so much of in this country --- ringing in bodies such as the WPIAL and PIAA --- is something simply outdated for kids who are truthfully high athletic achievers or on their way to that point.
Indeed, we’d lose that neighborhood rivalry. We’d lose all the romanticism and Norman Rockwell idealization of what it like to compete against and potentially beat that team from the next town over.
But these are different times.
That world is headed toward being dead for good.
I can see a time, in the not-too-distant future where the really good high school age athletes say to hell with playing for their high school --- again, except in football. They can go play full-time on the AAU circuit or with their travel team or wrestle for their club without the nonsensical binds of some entity like the PIAA.
In fact, I don’t just see it, I advocate it. I think it would be the best system.