On Tuesday, in a girls' basketball game, Pearl Cohn defeated Hume-Fogg 101-8.
Yes, you read that right.
One-hundred-and-one to eight.
It's the fifth time this season that the Lady Blue Knights have finished a game with only eight points on the board. But amazingly, it's not their lowest score of the season. That came on January 3, when Maplewood beat them 85-3.
No, your eyes still aren't playing tricks on you; that final score reads eighty-five to three.
Tom Kreager of The Tennessean - formerly of the Daily News Journal - published an article on Wednesday about Hume-Fogg's struggles. According to the article, the Lady Blue Knights have one player who returned from last season's squad, and no player on the team plays AAU ball in the summer to sharpen her skills.
Of course, the article goes into talk about sportsmanship, and running up the score, and this Saturday, when Districts 10-AA and 12-AAA meet to determine their brackets, sportsmanship will be discussed.
While running up the score certainly isn't ideal, what is a team supposed to do when they play someone who is obviously weaker than they are?
Hume-Fogg obviously aren't the only team who have been blown out in girls' basketball this season; LaVergne have also been drubbed; not as badly as the Lady Blue Knights, but the Lady Wolverines have only finished four games with more than 30 points on the board this season. And in their two games against Stewarts Creek in District 7-AAA play, LaVergne scored just 11 points in both games. They also lost 72-11 to Oakland on December 9, but last Friday, it was announced that the Lady Patriots were forfeiting that game, along with the 71-25 win over LaVergne on January 24, plus the 16 other games they'd won through last Friday, thanks to playing an ineligible player in those 18 victories. For LaVergne, it's the first time they've won a district game since 2013-14, and it's the first time they've won multiple district games in a season since 2009-10, when they went 8-2. Shame it had to come from forfeits, though.
Looking back through their old schedules on CoachT.com, both LaVergne and Hume-Fogg have been through long rebuilding periods during this decade; Hume-Fogg have not anything close to a winning season in district play since 2010-11, when they finished 8-8. The aforementioned 2009-10 season is LaVergne's last successful one to date.
Girls' basketball isn't the only sport where teams have struggled for a long time; Coffee County's football program has not finished above .500 since 2007. Warren County has not had a winning season on the gridiron this century.
Then there's softball. Blackman are finally making gains again after spending the last five seasons recovering from have their roster decimated by the formation of Jack City's spring travel ball program. Part of the Lady Blaze's rebuild has been the introduction of head coach Kelsey Ferguson, who's not even 30. LaVergne have not had a winning season on the diamond since 2003.
So, how does all of this tie in?
Well, every four years or so, the TSSAA executive board votes on whether or not to reshuffle classes. They typically do, especially next year, with many private schools opting to move to Division II. Schools are placed in classes by their student body counts; the public schools with the highest counts are placed in 6A in football, and AAA in other Division I sports.
This may have been a good solution before there was a division for private schools, but now, this is misguided. Placing a school in the highest class because of its student population is insane. Just because a school has a ton of students doesn't mean it's full of elite athletes. Every school has at least one elite athlete in a sport, but not all of their sports teams contain elite athletes.
It's time for the TSSAA to get radical about this; it's time for the TSSAA to introduce promotion and relegation.
"Promotion and relegation? What's that?" I hear you asking.
Promotion and relegation is a system used in European and Central and South American sports - particularly soccer - where a team is placed into a league based upon its performance in the previous season. The most famous example is the English Premier League, where the teams that finish in the last three positions on the table (18th through 20th) are dropped into the second tier of English soccer, the English Football League Championship, for the following season, and are replaced by the Championship's Top 2 finishers, plus the winner of a four-team playoff between the clubs that finish in positions three through six. A relegated club can immediately earn promotion right back to where they came from, and a promoted team can be sent right back down the following season if they don't perform. Leicester City, who famously avoided being relegated from the Premier League with a fantastic run through the final month of the 2014-15 season, then, even more famously, defied 5,000-1 odds to WIN THE PREMIER LEAGUE TITLE LAST SEASON, are currently one single, solitary point above the relegation zone in the current campaign. And yes, they can be relegated; being the reigning champions doesn't give them an exemption. Mexico's soccer leagues also use promotion and relegation, although their system isn't as simple as the leagues in Europe.
So, why don't we have this in the United States? It's simple: soccer teams in Europe are clubs formed by people in the pubs, whereas we have franchises purchased by billionaires. Instituting promotion and relegation in the USA would break antitrust laws.
That's not to say that people aren't clamoring for such a system to be installed here; there's a massive grassroots campaign to introduce promotion and relegation in American soccer. The man at the forefront is a gentleman named Ted Westervelt, whose Twitter handle is @soccerreform. Here is Westervelt's long but thoroughly detailed idea for American pro/rel.
While it would take legal wrangling to bring pro/rel to American professional sports leagues, it would be much easier to install at the high school level. Teams should be in a class based upon their performance, not their school size.
That's why I say it's time for the TSSAA to get radical, and introduce promotion and relegation to team sports. And I know exactly how I would implement it. How? Well, let me get the numbers from Hermitage, and I'll post a Part 2 to this blog this weekend.
-Michael Hackney
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