High school sports in West Virginia are in a state of disarray.
A pair of competing injunctions have halted the Class A volleyball state tournament indefinitely as well as the prep football playoffs.
As it stands the West Virginia Supreme Court will likely need to hear both cases and rule in favor of either side, allowing the WVSSAC to proceed with both postseason tournaments.
So how did we get here? I decided to take the deep dive and figure out where to lay the blame. There’s enough of it to go around, but I kept coming back to one entity – the Board of Directors.
Before moving further it’s important to distinguish and define the various entities mentioned.
- The WVSSAC Executive Board – These are the people tasked with the day-to-day operations of the WVSSAC as well as enforcing the rules and guidelines set by the organization. This group is comprised of David Price, Wayne Ryan, Cindy Daniel and Dan Comer.
- The WVSSAC Board of Control (BOC) – This board is comprised of the middle and high school principals.
- The WVSSAC Board of Directors (BOD) – These are the important ones. This board is composed of 10 members from various organizations. Five are appointed by different organizations (West Virginia Athletic Directors Association, West Virginia Association of School Administrators, West Virginia School Board Association, West Virginia State Board of Education and the State Superintendent’s Designee) the other five are elected by the BOC to represent five different districts. They have the authority to vote on and administer the regulations of the WVSSAC and they can appoint an Executive Director and hold all hearings and render decisions in contested cases (appeals).
- The Board of Review (BOR) – Separate from the WVSSAC, this entity is part of the state department.
- The Competitive Balance Committee – A committee formed in 2018 with the intent of parsing through various formulas, data and scenarios that would help the WVSSAC in its quest to make its sports more competitive.
Please refer back to these terms as needed, we’ll be using them quite a bit.
So let’s start at the beginning.
The three class-system was expanded to four ahead of the 2021 basketball season, used as a trial period. It passed overwhelmingly through the BOC by a vote of 111-26. A formula that factored in the variables of enrollment, economic score and location score were used to classify schools as opposed to enrollment which had previously been the lone standard.
I still agree that the four-class system is best. Those that shout about participation trophies also yell at clouds. The system awards only one additional state championship per sport and the WVSSAC isn’t sending trophies to the first teams that lose in the sectional round. Nobody is awarded a state championship trophy unless they win. Throw your priors away.
After a successful trial run in basketball, the BOC voted 117-12 to add a fourth class in five different sports (football, volleyball, softball, baseball and cheer) in April of 2023. That proposal passed through the state board and later the BOD and was implemented to begin the 2024-25 school year. That means as much as detractors groan about the four-class system, the principals overwhelmingly favored it on two different occasions!
Before any of this ever took place the Competitive Balance Committee was formed in 2018 to help find a solution to the competitive balance issues in the state.
This committee, which met in person on numerous occasions, is where the formulas were brainstormed and originated from. At least 27 different administrators including principals, superintendents and athletic directors have served on the committee since its inception with four of them – Trent Sherman (Principal of Martinsburg), Meredith Dailer (Principal of Wheeling Park), Eddie Campbell (Superintendent of Tucker County and later Monongalia County Schools) and Mike Kelley (Principal of Herbert Hoover Principal), Greg Bonnell (Athletic director at Doddridge County) – also serving on the BOD.
Those five were a part of email threads, privy to the information and beliefs of the committee as a whole and a part of the BOD that made the final vote in December.
A source, who spoke to Lootpress on the condition of anonymity, was a member of the committee and made note of several factors that were believed to have led to the current state of affairs.
- The committee largely favored Class AAAA to feature 16 teams for football only because it’s a different sport dependent on health and the number of players available.
- The committee’s job wasn’t to recommend a playoff format change for Class AAAA, it’s only job was to find a formula that worked best. That said they did discuss it because the point of an 0-10 team making the playoff field in Class AAAA was discussed and heavily discouraged.
- When the committee looked at formulas, several were considered including splits of (based on enrollment score-location score-economic score) 80-10-10, 70-20-10, 70-15-15, 60-20-20.
The committee member that spoke with Lootpress noted the SSAC expressed to the group that it was never its job to change the playoff format or draw classification lines. As such, they were presented with the data without the names of each school and most liked what they saw. The anonymous source thought it should’ve just stayed that way.
When the names were revealed, members of the committee didn’t like where some schools were placed.
“Not many people in that meeting could put West Virginia first instead of their own school,” the source said.
Eventually the committee passed the 80-10-10 formula.
Afterwards the formula was passed along to the BOD for a vote and with it the recommendation that Class AAAA be smaller than the other three classes for football alone as well as where to establish the cut lines.
The BOD rejected the recommendations for where to draw the cutlines, opening Pandora’s box.
The 10-member board at the time consisted of Dottie Smith, Trent Sherman, Mike Collins, Mike Kelley, Meredith Dailer, Eddie Campbell, Robert Dunleavy, Greg Bonnell, Dr. James Wilson and Jim Crawford.
They decided to even out the classifications as much as possible which had a cascading domino effect. The hope of 16 teams in quad-A was dashed when the cut line was drawn at 25 and passed by a 6-3 vote. That pushed numerous other schools up into the bottom of the next highest class down the board.
I reached out to Collins, Sherman, Dailer, Kelley and Eddie Campbell for comment. Collins gave a statement, Dailer declined comment, Kelley and Sherman didn’t respond to an email sent to each while Eddie Campbell granted a 30-minute interview from his perspective.
The issue seemed to largely stem from how to handle quad-A, thus I thought the perspectives of Dailer, Sherman and Campbell would be the most important,
Eddie Campbell was open that he was against a smaller quad-A class.
“Me personally I just, I can’t really wrap my head around the concept of 16 teams basically forming their own conference for the sport of football,” Campbell said. “It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. You’ve got the possibility that exists that an 0-10 team becomes a playoff team because we got 16 teams and we’re going to take all 16 teams? And I know that a lot of conversation revolved around that that idea and the thought process behind it and it still doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that you’re just  gonna have that for a conference (which is) really what it is in the in the sport of football and that you’re going to address all other sports across the state in a different different way.”
My questions that stemmed from that answer – what about the other sports where everyone makes the postseason and was the solution to change the playoff format for quad-A ever discussed and would you have been in favor of it?
“Football has always been a sport that stands alone in the sense that you you realize that you can’t take every team and that’s not much different than any other sport in the college ranks, ” Campbell said. “I think the other sports lend themselves to sectional play and tournament play and and they give everybody that second opportunity, but because of the physicality of a football, and the fact that you know you can’t take every team in the state and put them in a playoff scenario unless you cut your season down. It’s a different beast that we’re dealing with. Sixteen teams having to qualify it makes more sense than just 16 teams that play 10 games and then go into a playoff scenario. That for me is difficult to understand philosophically.”
As for a reformed Class AAAA playoff that features either eight or 12 teams, Campbell would’ve favored it more than allowing all 16 in but didn’t explicitly back it.
“I think it makes for a better scenario for the quality schools,” Campbell said. “It promotes, from a competition standpoint, that you’re gonna get your eight schools that have to qualify, they’re certainly going to be more competitive than the ones down at the bottom end of that spectrum, and again you’ve really taken the purpose of 10 regular season games out of out of context with the exception that I’m simply playing for a seed. That’s all I’m doing right now is I’m playing for a playoff position for 10 weeks during the regular season Eight teams in my opinion certainly, again it makes it just even more interesting for spectators for fans to say well eight teams are gonna get in and eight teams aren’t. I’ve gotta qualify. It puts meaning into the regular season.”
Disregarding the recommendation also had cascading effects on the formula. Much of the Competitive Balance Committee that favored the 80-10-10 split did so under the assumption that Class AAAA would be smaller. The source who spoke to Lootpress said had they known that cutlines in quad-A would’ve grouped 25 schools into the classification, they would’ve went with a 70-20-10 split. The 80-10-10 split only worked for a 16-class quad-A field.
This was further supported by the numbers. The total score drop-off from the No. 16 school (Beckley, 67.8) to No. 17 (Riverside, 61.3) was 6.5 points, the largest differential between any two schools in the state. The next highest differential was 5.6 points between the No. 2 (Musselman) and No. 3 (Huntington) schools by score.
Essentially the formula recommended didn’t match the cutlines the BOD made. It matched the ones it rejected.
I also suspect this is why the BOR found flaws in the formula when it made its ruling in August. Of course the formula was flawed, it was applied to the incorrect system. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the highest scoring school the BOR, a neutral outside entity, elected to drop was Preston which was No. 18 in the state, two spots below the recommended cutline.
Given all of this information, which was available at the time, I can’t comprehend why the BOD went against these recommendations. It wasn’t just the committee that recommended treating quad-A differently but as multiple sources have confirmed to Lootpress, the executive directors recommended it as well. The BOR decision that later granted the 11 appeals specifically cited the proposed cutlines of the executive directors and that the BOD rejected them.
Having worked with the executive directors to sort out our media needs, I can’t imagine why the BOD thought it best to go against the people that deal in the day-to-day operations of the WVSSAC. The best way I can sum it up, the BOD inadvertently sabotaged the entire organization.
Even more puzzling is the fact there were five members who overlapped the board and committee so they likely had the knowledge that 80-10-10 would only work with the recommendation of a smaller quad-A.
Before the December meeting where the BOD drew the classification lines had concluded, there were already accurate leaks of the information on WVtailgatecentral.com, a popular high school sports message board.
Once the classifications entered the court of public opinion, they were skewered.
Most were unhappy with where the bottom schools in Class AAAA and AAA landed. Another glaring classification note was one that favored Bluefield which landed in Class AA despite a rich tradition of success in basketball and football at the higher levels of the sport. This, unfairly, put Mike Collins in the spotlight as he’s also the principal at the high school.
Three separate sources, including Campbell, confirmed to Lootpress that there was no collusion on Collins’ part. I’m inclined to believe this and to back it I look no further than the fact Bluefield was a Class AA school in basketball the last four years even before Collins’ term on the board. Adding to his case, he wasn’t on the committee that decided which formula to use. When another proposal was recommended and approved last month, it also placed Bluefield in Class AA.
Those weren’t the only rumors floated. There’s a belief that the interests of the Mountain State Athletic and Cardinal Conferences came into play as well. Keeping Class AAAA at 25 teams would’ve kept the MSAC intact. Dropping it to 16 drops MSAC member schools Capital, Spring Valley, South Charleston, St. Albans and Riverside to Class AAA. In the Cardinal Conference Chapmanville, Wayne and Sissonville would’ve remained in Class AAA but dropped to double-A after a BOR mandate.
Campbell pushed back against those rumors.
“I served 13 years on the WVSSAC board of directors and never at any point did I ever think that those ladies and gentlemen ever tried to manipulate anything that would benefit their particular school,” Campbell said. “That was one of the things I always appreciated about those people.”
After the classifications were officially released, the appeal process began.
The appeal process for classifications is a relatively new one, added and passed by the BOC between 2021 and 2024. It was never necessary under the old method which drew class lines strictly on enrollment. There was no room for argument but it’s the other Pandora’s box in this equation as its implementation gives schools free reign to eternally appeal their placements. When a proposal was brought up in October to eliminate the appeal process for classification it was mostly met with resistance with the seeds of distrust sown over the previous 10 months.
The BOD shattered trust but the BOC passing an appeal process laid the groundwork for calamity.
As noted earlier, the same BOD that drew the classification lines is also responsible for hearing appeals and rubber stamped each one it heard with a no.
This was just another misstep by the BOD. The sentiment among the schools appealing was if some of the appeals had been granted they could walk away feeling as though the appeals were taken seriously on an individual basis. The fact that they were denied across the board only infuriated the schools.
Two separate schools that filed appeals expressed to Lootpress that they thought the Board of Directors were disrespectful and didn’t take their appeals seriously. One specifically noted that multiple members were on their phones during their appeal. It led to a back-and-forth bouncing of the appeals between the BOD and the BOR, the latter of which is an organization outside of the WVSSAC.
Eventually the BOR mandated that the 11 schools that kept pushing their appeals be dropped a class, citing health and safety concerns. The recommendation was again to follow the cutlines suggested by the executive directors.
This led to the WVSSAC dropping 12 more schools that had formula scores lower than the original 11.
That was another domino that impacted the playoff ratings points of the teams who constructed their schedules under the impression that the teams that dropped were going to be worth a different set of points. When they dropped, their point values dropped with them to reflect the class they competed in, leading to the injunctions we’re currently faced with.
Volleyball took advantage of those teams dropping across the board with a pair of programs filing injunctions to move from Class AA to Class A. The argument was if the football programs dropped then the volleyball programs should be entitled to that same privilege.
Now we’re in a holding pattern.
Neither of those tournaments can legally proceed until all the injunctions have been ruled upon and eventually heard in the Supreme Court. As a side note, I know the law is up to interpretation but it doesn’t feel good that every judge ruling in these injunctions has found a way to rule against the WVSSAC and in favor of the hometown team. That’s not saying that some of the injunctions don’t have merit. Westside’s is concise, well worded and framed in a way that makes it hard to disagree with. I actually agree with its argument.
And while the WVSSAC, specifically its executive board, is getting grilled for not allowing the ratings points to remain at their December values, dropping them correspondingly in August, I also agree with that decision. The schools that appealed and were ultimately dropped a class had a choice to play in the class they dropped to, or the one they dropped from. Even the other 12 that were moved down after the initial BOR appeals were granted could have played up in the original classes they were sorted into.
Sure, teams scheduled each other under the impression one would be in one class, but contracts are between the schools. The decision ultimately comes down to the schools – do what you think is best for your kids or honor your contracts as intended. I don’t fault either line of thinking but that’s where the responsibility lies. Regardless, the ratings points formula isn’t a big secret. Some team would’ve likely figured out one point system aided their playoff cause and filed an injunction to have the points distributed in a manner that favors them.
Maybe the best way to solve that moving forward is to mandate all injunctions be heard in Kanawha County where our capitol is. Remove any implications of bias. And if an injunction is filed by a Kanawha County school, have a backup court designated to hear it.
Since the BOD vote in December that led to the current state of affairs, Eddie Campbell, Steve Campbell, Mike Collins and Mike Kelley have moved on from the board. Collins and Kelley were not reelected when their terms expired this past year and the growing sentiment is that other members will lose their seats when their terms expire for their roles in the current catastrophe.
During my research, I asked Collins specifically if he’d change anything knowing what he does now.
“It’s easy for me to play Monday Morning Quarterback and say that now,” Collins said. “That said I could’ve never dreamed we would end up in a situation like this. I didn’t and still don’t favor a system that lets every team in a class into the playoffs. I don’t think that’s fair to the smaller schools that have to fight to make the playoffs. I would probably be in favor of a smaller playoff in that class with 16 teams, just as long as there was something to play for. I was voting for what I thought was best for the state as a whole.”
It’s hard not to lay the blame solely at the feet of the BOD.
At last year’s Super Six, I asked multiple people about what a four-class system could look like in other sports, specifically football. I wrote about it in a column at the time (which is why you should read The Deep Post).
“The rule could be different for each Class. For example the new Class AAAA could allow just eight teams into the playoffs while the other classes allow 16 each. That would create a first-round bye for the Class AAAA playoffs which would make sense given that class would have around 20 schools while the others push 30.”
I published that on Dec. 3. The BOD meeting that finalized the classifications was held on Dec. 20. The solution was always there and the competitive balance committee agreed. It was always on the table as a recommendation.
Regardless, a classification formula proposal presented by Spring Valley passed in an October BOC meeting by a relatively narrow margin of 75-59. The proposal, while better, again misunderstands Class AAAA and how to appropriately handle it. The proposed cutlines will likely put 16 teams in the classification for all sports.
Quad-A football needs to be treated in a very specific, different manor – 16 teams, smaller playoff field. Quad-A can have more schools in other sports where health and safety don’t come into play as much as they do in football. If the BOD was flummoxed by the thought of automatcially letting an entire classification into the playoffs, how do you think the thought of eight one-game basketball regionals in Class AAAA will go over?
Factor in travel expenses during those sports seasons where you’re playing three or four games a week and I’d be stunned if that proposal passes through the state board. It’s already divisive as the vote, which was much closer than any of the four-class system votes were, would indicate.
And if it does in fact fail, we’re back in the same boat without a solution.
The state legislature goes into session in January and this is already on the radar. If that happens does the WVSSAC get a chance to rectify these mistakes? I’d hope so, but the entire body will need to hammer the details and leave no stone unturned. You’re never going to find a solution that pleases every school in the state but you can get one that takes care of most of the state.
So what would be a good solution? I liked Spring Valley’s proposal but it has to be tweaked for quad-A in sports outside of football. The playoffs for that class would likely need a restructure as well.
I would also recommend giving more authority to the executive directors in these matters. The one quote from my anonymous source that served on the committee rings through my head.
“Not many people in that meeting could put West Virginia first instead of their own school.”
The executive directors, who have been shredded because they’re the public faces of the organization, are the boots on the ground of that organization and hold no specific allegiances to a school. They all have personal backgrounds but put the needs of the whole above all.
Two of those members – Wayne Ryan and Cindy Daniel – were executive directors that navigated the Covid crisis. Now they’ve been handed another crisis.
I’ve disagreed with them on numerous fronts, specifically the transfer rule which I favor. But when they explain their reasoning you can tell they have opposed it with the interests of everybody in mind.
I hope the BOD that largely created this mess remember that group when they’re doing their holiday shopping this season.
With basketball season around the corner I look forward to when we resume settling our disputes on the courts instead of in them. Though considering how much our state admires high school basketball, I believe the next three months will make the last three look like a cakewalk.
Email: tylerjackson@lootpress.com and follow on Twitter @tjack94
