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Just like seeding the sectionals- it really is NOT that hard. Just bump the P/P up one class and be done with it. They have built-in advantages over Public schools and anyone who denies that is just delusional.

You and I have been making the same argument (for many years it would seem) but haven't been reading each other's posts. I was calling it "effective enrollment", but describing the same issue in the same way as you. I hadn't heard the term clearing house but it makes a lot of sense. My kids attend Gibson Southern and as it is a rural 3A school in an area with solid employment opportunities, therefore the number of "free and assisted" kids is low comparatively across the state. That isn't to say "free and assisted" kids are always the "never going to participate in anything" kids, but we all understand it is a factor. All of that said, GS is going to have better participation rates than a lot of public 3A schools. I have done a non-scientific poll with my 4 kids and they say it's anywhere from 15-30% of kids that would fall into the "don't participate in anything category". In my mind this is the biggest reason why enrollment-based classification doesn't work and why there is such a huge disparity in success for equally "enrolled" P/Ps. Folks will always take this argument into a ditch with feeder system analysis and recruiting talk etc. etc. That is all just noise. There are privates and publics who both do all of the little things well to make a program great....but when all things are equal the P/P has a HUGE advantage out of the gate given the enrollment type disparity that they don't like to talk about.

Clearinghouse method was basically a system where you only count the number of kids that participate in ANY extracurricular activities. This wouldn't be difficult to do...most schools have some form of "Code of Conduct" that students have to sign in order to participate in any extracurricular (sports, band, etc), so the data isn't gonna be hard to grab. This number would be use for classificaiton, not the DOE "enrollement" number. This does a more accurate job of classifying based upon the size of the "participant" population in the school....and it doesn't matter if that school is public, P/P, charter, Hogwarts, etc The real enrollement disarity the P/P's enjoy is they don't have the (please forgive me for using this term....its the best descriptor, I can think of) "dead weight" part of the student body. They have no mandatory enrollees. ALL public schools have kids they HAVE to enroll by law. These kids may contribute nothing to the school in terms of extracurricular participation (for a variety of reasons), but they are still counted in enrollement. Now what that percentage of "never gonna participate in anything" enrollee's actually calculates to will vary a LOT. At Zionsville, Cathedral, University, West Lafayette....its probably a small percentage of the overall student body. At IPS, South Bend Schools, etc...its probably a LARGE percentage.

I agree. A regional and a state title in back to back years means a bump, regardless of whether its the same cycle or consecutive cycles. Ev. Memorial won 3A state in 2017 and lost at 3A state in 2018 - bumped to 4A in 2019. Mater Dei lost at 2A state in 2021 and won 2A state in 2022 - no bump to 3A in 2023. That's a bad system.

Uh....yes.... they do. I have walked the hallways of Memorial, I have walked the hallways of Mater Dei - and I have walked the hallways of Southridge. They are not the same - not even close.

There are some weak sectional fields out there across some sports. I would never support a system where a program like GS girls tennis gets bumped up for multiple consecutive sectional titles while having never won a regional.

Not if its a "rolling" 4 year cycle. The year they acrue enough points they would bump up the next season.

Not to dig up any old dead horses...but these so called academics need to take statistics 101 again....As has been pointed out ad naseum....The advantage in P/P demographics is not who they count.....but who they NEVER have to count. The fact this went unstated in the article is due to one of more of the following: Poor quoting of the researchers statements from the Indystar. Ignorance of the researchers on the issues relavent to their study Some type of bias in study's collection methods. A "clearinghouse" method of counting students would account for this, and may have possibly precluded any need for SF.

I like the idea of the lookback or trending forecasting model as opposed to just a set 2-year snapshot. Ultimately, you want programs to move up to a next level because their PROGRAM is ascending and not just because a couple of teams did so in a couple of years. The main reason that I suspect that most people who think that 2-year is too short and argue for 4-year isn't specifically because it's accurate, but because 1) it's better than 2-year in looking at program ascendancy as opposed to just limited team success and 2) it's easy to implement, as well as explain, than the lookback or trending modeling might be. Edit: BTW, Scecina is a school that got bumped and didn't win a state final in doing so ... 1A to 2A with a pair of red rings. Happened in the first implementation of SF bump ups.

This one hit me hard. My lifelong love affair with football began as a young kid growing up in a western suburb of Cleveland. My interest in the game paralleled his career, and I watched almost every NFL game he ever played. On the field, he was like a force of nature. He was the best football player I ever saw. But, he was also much more than a football player, and it would be short changing his legacy to think of him only on those terms. Incidentally, he was also one of the greatest players in the history of NCAA lacrosse. When I played lacrosse at Notre Dame, I wore #32 in his honor. A very sad day.

In other words they gave up the name to kick out Lebanon, Tri-West and Danville.