Part II: Football realignment has lacked desired results

Warwick Beacon ·

Division I: The Big Two

Division I’s best public schools this year are South Kingstown, Portsmouth, Cranston East and Central. 

The Rebels (5-1) and Patriots (3-2) played one of the league’s few all-timers this season, which saw SK storm back to score 21 unanswered and win in overtime. 

East (3-1) is in the midst of perhaps its best year since it made the Super Bowl in 2013. The ’Bolts started the season with three consecutive victories to move into a first-place tie with La Salle. Central (4-2) has been one of realignment’s best success stories, urging a move to D-I and producing nicely.

Despite each team’s accomplishments, there is still a chasm between them and the two private schools that run the show, Bishop Hendricken and La Salle.

SK lost 35-0 to Hendricken earlier this year. Portsmouth was blown out 54-14 by the Hawks. East, on the other hand, was throttled 56-18 by La Salle. Central, despite its bid for a home playoff game this year, got handed a 55-6 defeat at the hands of the Rams. 

The most frightening aspects of all those games? The results could have been worse. Hendricken and La Salle have rarely had to roll out their full units for 48 minutes, usually icing victories by the halftime horn. 

Adding teams to Division I has just diluted it. The competition has not increased. The balance of power has not been thrown off. Of those 51 games across all three divisions decided by at least 28 points, 21 of them have come from the unfriendly confines of D-I. 

“I can’t answer that, don’t know,” RIIL Executive Director Tom Mezzanotte said of how public schools can better compete with privates. “Private schools draw from a larger area. They have excellent facilities. It’s a situation where the best athletes go to the programs where they have the best chance of winning. It’s not only in football. What do we say to those kids, ‘No, you can’t go’?"

Not all of those lopsided losses are a result of those that moved up. Cranston West and Barrington are among D-I mainstays that have had especially difficult campaigns. 

That’s not to say the new squads aren’t having their growing pains. 

Central is the exception among newcomers, while St. Ray’s has had some impressive outings. The Saints breezed past East Providence, 41-14, while falling to SK by just a field goal. The Saints have done all this despite a school enrollment of 440 students.

However, five teams in total joined D-I, and the other three are not faring well. Rogers sits outside the top 40 in state enrollment, yet found itself in Division I this summer. The Vikings are 2-3, but have had issues hanging with its subdivision’s top-flight teams. This weekend, they dropped a 48-7 decision to La Salle. 

"I think the league did a poor job with this alignment,” Rogers head coach Frank Newsome said. “What they did was they watered down Division I by moving teams up, so that teams in the middle had someone they could beat, knowing the problem was always going to be Hendricken and La Salle. Moving D-III teams to D-II creates the same problem. I think there were a lot of people that didn’t think it would work before it started.”

Woonsocket and Tolman were also puzzlingly placed in D-I, but have both gone winless so far this year. The two have combined to score just 46 points and allow 316 with matching 0-5 starts, bringing the combined record of the five teams to 8-18 overall.

Tolman moving up, placing 11th in the new realignment scheme, while Shea remained down is especially confusing considering both are public schools that cull their players from Pawtucket. The Tigers were 4-3 in D-II last year and could have built towards a championship there, but instead the formula moved them to D-I. 

“I just think right now it’s difficult with the depth of kids,” Tolman head coach Jason Delawrence, whose roster features only 29 players, said. “I’m very young this year, speaking just for me it’s tough to continuously rebuild when you don’t have the numbers like the biggest schools.”

Woonsocket faces a similar issue, carrying 40 players on its roster according to the RIIL website. It is worth wondering whether the successive losses and unrelenting assault of Division I will have an impact on morale down the road. 

“It’s hard when you haven't won a game and you have 14-, 15-, 16-year-olds, because Tolman has a winning tradition,” Delawrence said. “My kids are keeping it together, I have a core of kids that are coming to practice. I would prefer to be a strong Division II team. Once the kids get used to doing it, hopefully we’ll able to rebound from it but time will tell.”

“I would think so,” Newsome said on whether a team’s morale could suffer under these circumstances. “Morale hasn’t taken a hit from my team, luckily. One or two years of that can really devastate someone’s program. I wish they took that into account. We appealed our position [to RIPCOA], but I don’t think we ever had a chance. We should have fought it, everyone knew this wasn’t a good fit.”

Splitting D-I into subdivisions doesn’t solve the problem of Hendricken and La Salle. Perhaps the next realignment will see it shrink once more to eight or nine teams, which seems to be the appropriate amount of schools according to the opinion of the coaches interviewed.

Some of these teams could adjust, like Central and St. Ray’s. East head coach Tom Centore took the more positive approach in that regard. 

“I remember when we moved up in 2010 and we had a real strong program at that point,” Centore said. “We took quite a shellacking the first two, three weeks of the season. It takes you time to figure out playing at that speed at that level, it’s a big learning curve. I think it takes time to prepare and what’s going to allow you to compete at that level.”

Now, East has a substantial advantage in terms of bodies, with a roster that hovers around 100 kids. Central and St. Ray’s may not have quite that many players, but they could have what it takes to survive Division I in the long run.

Decreasing the division’s size and relegating Tolman and Woonsocket, among others, while bringing up Moses Brown, West Warwick and North Kingstown could make realignment a greater success in its next run.

The issue is that the Hawks and Rams, especially this season, are the masters of Rhode Island high school football. Hendricken has the best quarterback in the state, and the best overall defense as well. La Salle has a young core that could allow it to steal the torch from the Hawks next year and carry it for its own span.

Hendricken has won six D-I titles in a row. La Salle has appeared in four of the last six Super Bowls and could launch a run of its own soon. The only team that can stop Hendricken is potentially La Salle, and vice versa. No amount of teams in D-I can make it otherwise. As has been pointed out before by several astute observers, the last time neither Hendricken nor La Salle reached the Super Bowl was 1993. 

Having a Division I title game and a separate state championship doesn’t ameliorate the problem, either. It will be enjoyable to watch a meaningful playoff game that doesn’t feature The Big Two, but it is essentially a third-place game. 

Where do we go from here?

There are a number of options in the future, even if it looks like the RIIL has already crossed the Rubicon with its present alignment. 

One suggestion was moving all of the private schools, not just La Salle and Hendricken, out of the Interscholastic League and into one out of Massachusetts where they can face greater competition. 

"Their programs have gotten better so quick, but other schools can’t keep up with them,” Newsome said. “Hendricken and La Salle need to play in their own league with Moses Brown and St. Ray’s. The public schools will play their own league. Will I make La Salle better? Probably not. The elephant in the room is that LSA and BH generate a lot of money for the Interscholastic League, so they’ll be hard-pressed to give them up. Someone has to say it, or they throw people’s programs to the wolves and hope they survive.”

Newsome raised an interesting point, and the results against East, South Kingstown, Central and Portsmouth are evidence in support of it: Hendricken and La Salle have not faced many tests from the public schools this year, so it hasn’t dramatically improved them. 

“It’s great to win, but what do you accomplish?” Toll Gate head coach Jim Stringfellow said.

Bridging this gap can be difficult, and there is no immediate resolution.

Like Middletown head coach Art Bell said, some schools have down years, though that does not really apply to Hendricken and La Salle. They can stay in D-I, or play in their own form of Championship Division like in hockey. Since there would be only four teams, perhaps the two best public schools in a given year can move up.

“We put more teams in Division I only because it gives some teams in Division I the opportunity to win more games,” Mezzanotte said. “We could have gone with a four- or five-team Division I, and then again, is it fair for those four or five teams to barely have a chance to win a championship? So we put more teams [in D-I] that were competitive in D-II with the formula, but we created an opportunity in Division I with the other Super Bowl."

If they were to remain in regular Division I, though, the amount of teams has to be reduced. Nine teams was effective, which could mean a reversion to the four-division format. The Mount Saint Charles/North Smithfield Co-op, for example, was baptized by fire in its first season, being tossed into Division III-A with the likes of Smithfield and the Juanita Sanchez Co-op. 

That MSC/NS Co-op could have benefited from a couple of years in Division IV, which could include eight teams like it did before. Some of those teams mired in D-II, like Pilgrim and East Greenwich, or struggling Mount Pleasant could move down. The four-division system, with a smaller Division I, seems like the most likely solution.

One way or another, there needs to be changes. The amount of blowouts this year have been disproportionate and have hurt the product on the field. This formula clearly does not work. Sometimes the math doesn’t match the obvious. St. Ray’s and Central belong in D-I, but somehow Moses Brown seemingly doesn’t. Middletown and Pilgrim are in D-II, but Smithfield and Burrillville are not. 

Granted, it can be downright quixotic to pursue a formula that helps teams compete with the likes of Hendricken and La Salle or Moses Brown, but this isn’t the one. A meeting with the coaches who watch these games on a weekly basis could help determine the correct alignment. 

“There is no magic bullet,” Mezzanotte said. “We try to take a formula that we feel is fair, and it was developed by the athletic directors. We try to put elements that give you a good idea of where you should be. It’s better than subjectivity. You could build in another 20 categories. Do we rely on subjectivity or rely strictly on enrollment or geography? These are issues that have been discussed ad nauseum."

Success should not be measured over eight years, but potentially five, and reduce the impact of enrollment, so that teams like Woonsocket are not unjustly moved up. Receive input from those who know these players the best, such as a team like Tolman that may not have the numbers to keep up in the long term and could benefit from dropping back down. A formula can only go so far. It can determine a baseline, but for some of those fringe schools it can be questionable. 

This realignment was somewhat haphazard and over the course of the next two years will provide little change. At the end of this season, the results will be logged and maybe D-III will see the only difference. The same teams will be playing for the state title, and the Quakers will more than likely be aiming for a three-peat.

There may not be a panacea for the competition problem in Rhode Island, but there has to be one better than this.