BENNETT'S MINUTES: IHSAA realigns six sports classes

Friday, March 31, 2017

The Indiana High School Athletic Association announced new classifications for IHSAA member schools last week.

New baseball and softball classifications will be announced this week.

The alignments will apply to state tournament competition for the next two school years. Exact sectional groupings will be announced later this spring.

The enrollment figures, the total of boys and girls in grades 9-12, were submitted by the schools to the Indiana Department of Education last fall.

Some Putnam County schools were affected by the changes, while others find themselves in either desirable or unwanted spots at the top or bottom of the numerical lists.

Here is a look at each sport and how it affects Putnam County and other nearby schools:

Boys’ basketball — Greencastle is now the ninth smallest school in Class 3A.

Southmont, which was in the South Putnam Class 2A Sectional this year, moves up to 3A as one of the smaller schools in that class. South Vermillion makes a similar move from 2A up to 3A, while Western Boone is now the smallest 3A school and Monrovia is the third-largest 2A school.

Girls’ basketball — The same changes exist as in the boys’ tournament, with a few schools in either higher or lower spots than the boys due to the success factor affecting different schools.

Football — Defending sectional champion Danville is now the second-largest school in Class 3A, while Greencastle is the sixth-smallest 3A team.

Southmont, Monrovia and South Vermillion have been recent members of the Class 2A Sectional including North Putnam and Cloverdale, but have all now moved up to 3A.

Linton-Stockton has been moved up to 2A due to its success factor point total and could be one of the replacements.

Greg Barrett’s first two South Vermillion teams will compete at the 3A level.

Cloverdale is now the fifth-smallest school 2A, with five more students than Winamac and Eastern Greene, the largest 1A schools.

Volleyball — Greencastle again finds itself at the end of the four-class rankings as the sixth-smallest 3A school.

Boys’/girls’ soccer — The drawing of class lines was kinder to Greencastle in these sports, as the Tiger Cubs are the fifth-largest 1A school in the new three-class format.

Odds and ends

The things you learn..... — It was a pleasure to be able to attend the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame induction ceremony last month as Cloverdale’s Al Tucker became a member.

An impressive crowd of 1,100 was on hand and it was a great night.

One thing I had never heard before during a lifetime of sports fanaticism was that Edwin Hubble, the namesake of the Hubble Telescope launched into space in 1990, was an Indiana high school basketball coach before going on to his science accomplishments.

Hubble received the Centennial Award at the banquet, an honor created to recognize those who contributed to Indiana high school basketball more than 100 years ago.

As the coach at New Albany High School, he led the team to an undefeated regular season in 1913-14 and deep into the state tournament. Trouncing their opponents in the regular season, they thrashed rivals like Jeffersonville (40-3), Scottsburg (100-5), Salem (38-8) and Lexington (KY) (50-12), before bowing out in the quarterfinals of the 32-team state finals in Bloomington.

A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and earning a PhD in Astronomy at the University of Chicago, he made numerous discoveries and contributions to astronomy from the Mount Wilson Observatory in California before his death in 1953.

Indiana All-Star selections coming soon — Putnam County players have deservedly fared well in post-season basketball honors this spring.

Cooper Neese was named to the Indiana Basketball Coaches Association “Supreme 15” team and is considered by most observers to be a lock for selection to the Indiana All-Star team later this month.

South Putnam’s Allen Plunkett and Cloverdale’s Jalen Moore were named to the “small state” underclass all-state team, and Moore will also be a member of the Junior All-Stars this summer.

Cloverdale’s Tori Combs, a sophomore who amazingly didn’t turn 16 until recently, will participate in the IBCA Top 100 Underclassmen workout along with North Putnam’s Elliot Gross, who was somehow overlooked in the IBCA honor list.

The complete list of Top 100 Underclassmen participants has not yet been released. Greencastle’s Colin York, Moore and Plunkett all participated in that event last July.

Online stats should be required — There are two different ways of thinking among sports coaches in terms of making their team’s statistical information available to opponents.

Some coaches do not want to give their opponent the opportunity to exploit weaknesses among their players — most commonly poor free throw shooters in basketball.

Others feel teams that scout well will already know which players have such weaknesses and want to make as much information available as possible for their kids to get post-season recognition and potentially college recruitment.

Those fears would have been validated in North Putnam’s boys’ game at North Montgomery this year. The Cougars were six points behind in the final minute and were fouling to try to make North Montgomery shoot (and miss) free throws in order to get back in the game.

I was sitting near the Cougars’ bench, and saw one of their assistants consulting a stat sheet printout (presumably from MaxPreps). They picked out the perfect guy to foul, one who I later discovered was shooting in the 20-percent range, and he badly missed his one-and-one attempt.

The Cougars were able to come back and pull out the victory, and the availability of that information definitely helped them.

Still, I find those examples to be in the minority. One local coach adamantly rejects the fear of letting opponents know your team’s numbers and agrees with me, that if you have a bad foul shooter you either help him or her to get better or you get that player off the court in key situations.

About half of the eight Putnam County basketball coaches regularly post their team’s statistics on MaxPreps, and if everyone would then it would be possible to bring you stat leaders each week.

We ran into the same problem when I was working in Terre Haute, and so few coaches would submit their stats in the pre-MaxPreps days that the practice of running stat leader lists was ended.

The Sagamore Conference — with the Montgomery County schools, Danville, Tri-West, Frankfort, Lebanon and Western Boone — requires its member schools to post statistics online, and I wish the Western Indiana Conference would establish a similar rule.

Not just for the media types, although this one covers one-third of the WIC schools, but for the many potential uses for the benefits of student-athletes. I like to use the MaxPreps national lists when they apply, such as in a recent story on Combs about her national ranking in double-doubles. Those rankings are not totally valid, however, if they don’t include the numbers for all teams.

Some coaches truly don’t want to tip off their opponents, while others aren’t “techy” enough — or have the time — to enter the numbers online.

Sounds like a great thing for a school’s technology classes to work on, and I know there are some coaches who farm out such tasks to students for class projects.

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  • Greencastle soccer is AA according to IHSAA website

    -- Posted by bquery on Sun, Apr 2, 2017, at 11:57 AM
  • • One minor correction is needed to a recent column describing IHSAA alignments of schools in various sports.

    Greencastle’s soccer teams are in two different tourney classifications.

    In boys’ soccer, there are 303 teams competing statewide and the Tiger Cubs are at the bottom end of Class 2A. In girls’ soccer, there are only 267 competing teams so the Tiger Cubs fall to the upper end of Class 1A.

    -- Posted by jbennett on Tue, Apr 4, 2017, at 11:57 PM
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