By Jeremy Peppas
Stephens Media
LITTLE ROCK — Not every state is as rigid as Arkansas when it comes to classification.
In Tennessee, the state is split into eight geographical regions and conferences are made up in schools within each region.
The result is that some conferences might have as few as four teams and others as many as 10.
Bernard Childress, the recently appointed executive director of the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association, said classification was a struggle in his state.
“We try to cut down on regular-season travel,” Childress said. “That’s the No. 1 thing for us, so we might have as many as 10 teams in a conference because we put every school on the map and group them together as best we can.”
Tennessee still has some travel, at least for its private-schools division.
“Chattanooga to Memphis,” Childress said of the 700-mile round trip conference game between Memphis University School and Baylor. “That’s not good and we do everything we can to avoid that.”
Lance Taylor, Childress’ counterpart in Arkansas, echoed the difficulties here with reclassification issues.
“If you address one, then you have the other,” Taylor said. “We are always battling a discrepancy in numbers or in travel. What the schools now are trying to do is address both issues, and that’s something we haven’t done before.”
The solution, at least for Arkansas’ 32 largest schools, was to combine for the regular season by splitting into four conferences.
If the two classes had stayed apart, it would not have had much affect on 7A, but 6A would have been a mess.
Splitting into two conferences with eight teams could have had Van Buren in with Jonesboro or Texarkana with West Memphis, forcing schools crisscross the state for regular season games. No easy solution existed that did not have schools traveling 100 miles or more one way.
No state has an easy solution for classification. In a survey of states surrounding Arkansas, inconsistency was the only constant. No state classifies schools the same as another, which Taylor suggest was a much by necessity as by choice.
“Every state is different,” he said. “The thing that might work for us, wouldn’t work someplace else. I’ve talked to (recently retired TSSAA director) Ronnie Carter about it all the time and what they do in Tennessee and what we do and how everyone is different.”
