Finding a competitive balance
You’d have to be born British, I suppose, to understand all of it, to get it clear in your head; its many branches are, for those of us on the other side of the pond, indescribably confusing.
And yet the apparent mayhem (at least to these eyes) of English football (soccer) may contain a valuable roadmap for the WPIAL and schools like Albert Gallatin and Uniontown, whose high school football teams have hit on rough patches.
Let me say this at the outset: I know next to nothing about British soccer. This is what I know, or think I know: The ball is round and is mostly kicked, the field is a large rectangle, there are two goals manned by goalies opposite each other which must be either defended or attacked, the field itself is called the pitch, the players wear shorts, and the fans whistle, chant and occasionally riot if their team suffers a grievous defeat at the hands of officials.
There, that’s pretty much it. Except to say I was vaguely aware that losing teams are regularly dropped from a superior league into a lesser league, on the theory of competitive balance.
Then I looked into it. (OK, I googled “English soccer league” and read the Wikipedia summary.) It was an awfully long summary because, well, English soccer is gargantuan, encompassing 140 leagues, more than 480 divisions, 7,000 teams, and goodness knows how many players.
The WPIAL — Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League — is a piker, by comparison.
No need to go deeply into the composition of the WPIAL: for the purposes of football, schools are assigned to one of six classifications, based roughly on student enrollment figures, 1A through 6A.
Thus, Albert Gallatin occupied a slot in 5A, Conference 2, in 2018, along with Connellsville, Franklin Regional, Gateway, Latrobe, McKeesport, Penn-Trafford and Plum high schools.
Uniontown, meanwhile, played this past season in Conference 2 of the 3A classification, pitting the Red Raiders against Burrell, North Catholic, Deer Lakes, Derry, Elizabeth-Forward, Freeport, Mt. Pleasant and Yough.
Sorry to say, neither Albert Gallatin nor Uniontown scored a single victory in 2018. They were a combined 0-20. They were shut out a total of seven games, five of the shutouts belonging to AG. Both teams suffered 70-0 losses — Uniontown against North Catholic, Albert Gallatin against Penn Trafford.
The Colonials scored just 39 points all season. In five of six consecutive games they scored just seven points.
I’m not trying to be cruel or flippant here. At the high school level, these things happen. Schools experience talent-droughts, injuries, whatever. Athletically, some schools are up, others down — until they’re not.
(For that matter, neither Laurel Highlands, 3-7, nor Brownsville, 0-10, were all that hot. To round things out, Frazier won four games and lost six during the past football season. The bottom line: Fayette County high school football teams had a combined seven victories in 2018, against 43 losses.)
Because of its record, Albert Gallatin recently notified the WPIAL that it was dropping out of sanctioned play in 2019. Instead, it plans on playing a pickup schedule of games with schools from West Virginia and elsewhere.
School officials said the football program needs time to regroup, to get its mojo back. It plans on returning to the WPIAL; it just doesn’t know when.
Here is where the English soccer league might prove instructive for AG and the WPIAL. When a team, say, in the top English league — the 20-team Premier League — proves especially inept it is required to drop a notch, into the second best league — the 24-team Fooball League Championship.
Likewise, the worst two teams in the Football League Championship tumble annually into the next league down — Football League One. And so it goes, in one English soccer league after another.
What I’m suggesting is that some form of the English league practice occur whenever an WPIAL team skids to the bottom of its classifications without hope of immediate (say, two years) revival.
Unlike our English cousins, the process of scratching a school from its assigned spot should not be automatic; instead, the parties should probably huddle first — or call a time-out — to talk things over.
Who knows, given the state of Fayette County high school football, there might arise a temporary, improvised conference consisting of mostly local schools, all of whom hope to rise again.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.