What does balance even mean in sports

Last week, I gave some of my opinions regarding the new competitive balance rules the WIAA will likely be implementing starting in the 2024-25 season. Under the new rules, teams’ playoff division placement will be based not only on the school enrollment numbers, but also the team’s prior postseason success.

There were a couple issues that I found with this system that I spoke about last week. Turnover of senior athletes and teams essentially being punished for doing well were a few of the problems I presented. The committee that set up these rules seemed to recognize, at least in part, that the system as is was still flawed. As such, they have come up with a system in which a team may appeal their division placement to a classification committee.

According to the WIAA’s competitive balance page on their website, there are several criteria that the committee will examine when looking at these appeals. Some of these criteria include the percentage of students that are now out-of-building from prior varsity teams, the socioeconomic status and demographics of the school, student participation rate in sports, and the school’s admission policies.

This system seems to try to account for the gaps that I brought up in my previous column and while I appreciate the fact that they are offering a way for team’s individual circumstances to be examined, it feels like it will only further muddy the waters. Not only will it force some teams to have to go through a bureaucratic appeals process in order to be accurately placed, but more importantly it puts the decision in the hands of humans that will have their own built-in biases. The prior system, for all its faults, was objective. There is no arguing the hard numbers of enrollment. Now, though, with the addition of the appeals process, opinion and human error can play a part.

And that isn’t to say that those are necessarily bad. We will have to wait and see how the system plays out. Hopefully, the committee can remain as objective as possible and the system plays out how it is supposed to. What I question is if all this additional complication is actually worth all the effort and if it won’t just serve as another vessel for conflict between teams and the WIAA. We’ve seen with recent examples involving the Owen-Withee and Amherst football teams that appeals and arbitration processes often end with just more angry people than actual satisfactory results.

The funny thing about this conversation is that sports, by their very nature, are inherently “unfair.” The concepts of winning and losing are very much baked into these competitions, and by having that, you are essentially saying Team X is better than Team Y. If things were “fair,” then every game would end in a tie.

And I’m not suggesting that is what any one wants. That’s obviously not the case. Rather, I just find it interesting that there is such a push to find balance in a system that wholly built upon a lack of fairness. It is, in many ways, a fool’s errand, and no matter what is done, no matter where the lines are arbitrarily drawn, someone isn’t going to like it.

I guess the goal is to find the system that works best for the most people, but I wonder if this new system the WIAA will implement will actually work for more schools or if it is more of a shift horizontally. And even if it is does work better, if it is just an incremental change, will that have been a good use of time and resources? We will just have to see, but from where I’m sitting, the potential new problems introduced make me question if all this time spent on this was worth it.

A C ertain Point of V iew