Private school athletics: Hayden and Cair Paravel talk about KSHSAA recommendation

The Kansas State Board of Education will consider a proposal this week that would affect the manner in which private schools like Topeka’s Hayden High School and Cair Paravel Latin School count their enrollment for competition in sports and activities.

The Kansas State High School Activities Association (KSHSAA) will bring to the board of education meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday a recommendation to utilize a multiplier formula when counting the enrollment of the state’s 28 private schools that are members of the association.

Who would be affected in the Topeka area by the multiplier?

Crafted by a KSHSAA work group, the multiplier formula was approved by the association’s Board of Directors last April, then passed a vote of all member schools in June. Now it goes to the 10-member board of education.

Should that group approve the proposal, it would go to the state legislature, because the manner in which classifications are determined is established by state statute.

The multiplier would apply to any school that wins five or more state championships over a five-year period. It would then tack on multipliers based on geography and socio-economic makeup.

More: KSHSAA recommends utilization of multiplier formula for private school classification

Naturally, Topeka’s two private schools that participate in KSHSAA activities have paid close attention to the creation of the formula.

Were it to be applied today, the formula would have no impact on Hayden or Cair Paravel because neither has won five championships in the past five years. But that’s not to say that it wouldn’t at some point.

Just two years after joining KSHSAA, Cair Paravel won a state championship in cheerleading last school year. It finished second in Scholars Bowl. And its girls soccer team reached the state’s Final Four for 4A-1A despite being the only 1A school in the state with a girls soccer team last year.

Hayden, meanwhile, has won 73 state championships in its history.

Hayden has concerns that one sport could bump up others

“I don’t understand why it’s just on the private schools,” Hayden Athletic Director Bobby Taul said about the multiplier proposal. “To me, if you’re going to do it, let’s do it to everybody.

"There are public schools out there that have had just as much or more success than some of the private schools.”

Taul listed Derby, Baldwin and Buhler as schools that would exceed the ‘success factor’ in the formula due to an inordinate amount of success in just one sport. He pointed out that extreme success in one sport doesn’t equate to an across-the-board advantage.

“If you’re very good at football and you win state championships, they bump you up a class," Taul said. "But what about your other sports – your basketball, track, baseball, softball?

“They might not be very successful. But you might get bumped up to force them to compete at an even higher level just because of the success in football.”

Bishop Miege's dominance a concern

Taul said the motivation to enact the multiplier appears to be motivated by the dominance of a couple of private schools, primarily Bishop Miege in Kansas City.

The 4A school won five state titles last year – boys and girls basketball, boys and girls soccer and boys golf. Miege has won 20 team championships in the past five years, despite a number of activities being canceled in the spring of 2020.

“I think it’s pretty common knowledge that there are a couple of public schools that have got an agenda to go after the one private school,” Taul said. “I get it. I know that a lot of people talked about it the 4A state girls basketball tournament.

"That Miege team was very good.

"I do see the frustration from public schools because some of those schools had the best record they’ve ever had, and then they run into a machine that’s very fine tuned, and they get demolished.”

The Hayden boys basketball team lost to the eventual boys champion Miege 62-50 in the semifinal game at state.

“Our boys had to play them," said Taul. "That’s just the luck of the draw.

“We were just like ‘OK. Let’s go play Miege.’ When you play sports, you’re going to be faced with some adversity at times. You’re going to have to play some really great teams. We’re not going to back down from them.”

Taul said that to create a rule applying to all private schools just to address the dominance of one or two seems like an over-reaction.

“Just because we’re private, we’re lumped in with the ones you’re targeting,” said Taul.

Most private schools don't have unlimited funds

Gary Cleverdon, Athletic Director at Cair Paravel, said public schools pushing for the proposal may be motivated by misconceptions.

“I’ve heard their arguments. A lot of it has to do with lack of education,” Cleverdon said. “They think that private schools have an advantage because somehow we have unlimited funds.

"I don’t know where they think that we get the money, but they think that we have these plush weight rooms and facilities. We’ve had that discussion, and that’s just not the case.”

KSHSAA Assistant Executive Director Jeremy Holaday agreed that some may believe private schools have access to more financial resources than they actually do.

“I would say that the majority of public schools, whether it's administrators, coaches or teachers, don’t realize that private schools have amenities that are (of lesser quality) than public schools have," he said. "More often than not, the private schools are way behind the public schools in terms of facilities.

"And then I would say that the general public has an even more inaccurate perception than do the people representing public schools."

Hayden's gym not air-conditioned, football field has 'poor man's turf'

“We didn’t put out any kind of statement to make sure they knew that, but what we did try to do was make sure that there was good representation of every class and location of private schools on the classification committee to make sure they had a voice.

"I do remember the private schools expressing that concern to the others on the committee. Now whether that message made it back to the schools they are representing or not, we don’t know for sure.”

“I’ve always looked at our school as a blue-collar school,” Taul said. “The majority of our moms and dads who send their kids here are blue-collar.

"When you look at our facilities, we’ve got a gym that’s over 50 years old. It’s not air-conditioned. And people gripe that that we don’t have air conditioning and they don’t want to come here and play us because we don’t have air conditioning.

"But our kids get used to it. They get in that gym and they sweat like crazy.

“Look at our football field. Everybody else has turf all over the place. We call ours PMT – ‘poor man’s turf.’ We’ve got Bermuda grass out there. We’re finally getting new lights to replace the lights that have been out there since the field was built in the 1950s.

"We’re old school. We may actually lose students who go to the schools with the glitz and glamour.”

Most private schools don't recruit

Cleverdon pointed to another common criticism of private schools.

“A lot of people think that private schools recruit,” Cleverdon said. “But just because you move a school up a classification doesn’t stop them from recruiting.

"If a school recruits well enough to beat everyone in 4A, who’s to say that they wouldn’t beat everyone in 5A or 6A?”

Indeed, the Miege boys basketball team that won the 2021 4A state title featured Duke University commit Mark Mitchell and Kansas State commit Taj Manning.

That team, which defeated Louisburg 94-40 in the final game, would likely have beaten any team in the state regardless of class.

Taul said that some private schools might recruit, but that doesn’t mean that all of them do.

“You can go back and look at our enrollment, and you can see that the majority of our kids are Catholic kids,” Taul said. “They are homegrown kids. They’ve gone through our system.

"I’ve always joked when anyone accuses us of recruiting ‘OK, where’s our 6-foot-9 basketball player? Where’s that 6-foot-4, 235-pound linebacker?’ If we’re going out and recruiting kids, where are those kids?”

Cair Paravel joined KSHSAA knowing the pros outweighed the cons

Cair Paravel finds itself in the midst of the multiplier debate just two years after joining KSHSAA. Cleverdon helped spearhead the effort for the school to gain membership. He said the multiplier issue didn’t catch the school off guard.

“This is not a new topic,” Cleverdon said. “One of the biggest hurdles we dealt with was convincing our school board that, if we joined KSHSAA, it was not going to force us to change what we do internally.

"We’re different, and we’re proud to be different in a lot of ways. We might eventually be bumped up by the multiplier. But definitely, the pros (of membership) outweigh the cons.”

'They are being the mediator'

Cleverdon noted that KSHSAA sought input from private schools when developing the multiplier formula.

“A lot of people have a false impression that KSHSAA is the one driving this. It’s not,” Cleverdon said. “I’ve talked to Bill Faflick about our concerns. KSHSAA is not the one who’s the ugly person trying to change everything. They are being the mediator.”

“We’re not the driving force behind this. We’re the facilitator of it,” Holaday said. “We like to say that we are the people charged to interpret and carry out the will of the member schools. They are the KSHSAA.

"We in Topeka are just the people who help make sure their desire is put in place.”

Cleverdon said that, to his knowledge, no one has reached out to Cair Paravel about lobbying against, or taking any legal action in response to, the proposal. He expects larger private schools will make their opposition to the plan known at the board meeting and to the legislature if necessary.

“We discussed this in our meeting of athletic directors from (the Kaw Valley Conference, which includes several Kansas City-area private schools),” Cleverdon said. “Some of the schools from Kansas City said that they’ve been asked by those bigger schools who are affected, basically asking them for support.”

Hayden is no stranger to playing large schools, Taul said, and therefore has no plans to fight the multiplier proposal.

“It’s going to be what it’s going to be," Taul said. "If we get bumped up, we get bumped up.

“We have never backed down from playing anybody. We play in the Centennial League. We are a 4A school in a 6A league. We had 327 kids last year and we’re going up against Washburn Rural, that has over 2,000. We don’t whine or cry about that.

"That’s just the way it is.

"We look at it as, if we’re going to compete against the bigger schools, we’ve got to get better. We’ve got to work harder.”

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: KSHSAA proposal could affect private schools vs. public schools sports