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By TERRY NAU Sports editor Today is the first day of December, a good time to reflect on the autumn high school sports season in Rhode Island that is coming to an end over the next week with football playoffs serving as an exclamation point to another interesting campaign.
The Blackstone Valley crowned several state champions, led by the Woonsocket girls soccer team that beat Tolman in the Division IV championship match. The Villa Novans had won the regular season title last year and were upset in the playoff semifinals by Shea High so this championship season served as vindication for coach Dale Seward’s players.
Lincoln High’s boys’ soccer team broke through to win the Division II championship, knocking off regular season champion Shea in the title match. The Lions showed plenty of improvement as the season progressed. They lost to Shea 3-0 in an early-season game, then came back to play the Raiders to a stalemate on Lincoln’s home field later in the season.
Head coach Victor Alves, who never doubted his team in the moments after that early-season loss to Shea, knew what his club had to do to beat Shea and made it happen when it counted – in the state title match.
Mount St. Charles Academy collected its second straight girls’ tennis Division I championship in early November, reversing regular-season losses to Bay View and Lincoln School in the process. Again, it was the head coach, Richard Lawrence, who seemed to shape the outcome. At one point in the playoffs, the veteran mentor talked about holding a 6 a.m. practice session so that his players could get a first-hand feel for how the game changes in cold weather.
Listening to the coach talk about the dedication of his players, one could easily see why the Mounties always seem to peak when the playoffs come around.
“This never gets old,” Lawrence said after his team clinched a fifth state title for the school in this decade.
Central Falls High earned another Division III volleyball state championship, never losing a game during the entire season, sweeping every opponent it played. The Warriors compete in a six-team division and enjoyed the same kind of dominance Mount St. Charles used to show in Division I hockey two or three decades ago.
When a team wins in such dominant fashion, people may ask whether it is competing in the proper division. The Interscholastic League honchos might want to address this situation in the off-season. Is there even a need for a Division III in volleyball?
There were a few other tricky situations that came up over the past three months. One of them involved Ponaganset’s defending Division III Super Bowl championship football team. The Chieftains started out this season with five straight wins and appeared headed for a postseason showdown with Tiverton. Then came the news that the team had unwittingly used an ineligible player, costing the squad two of those five wins.
Ponaganset’s next game came against Tiverton and the Chieftains played the Tigers as close as any team would during the entire season, losing by a 14-6 score. Coach Tom Marcello’s team now had two losses instead of one and quickly added a third when Johnston rallied in the closing seconds for a 22-21 victory that stands as the defeat that knocked the Chieftains out of the playoffs, even though nobody knew this for certain until Narragansett defeated East Greenwich on Thanksgiving Day.
The question that will linger forever for Ponaganset’s players is this one: How good were we? Could the Chieftains have given Tiverton a battle in the Super Bowl? Nobody will ever know the answers. And because the players and their coaches coughed up a game they never should have lost (to Johnston), they can shoulder much of the responsibility for these unanswered questions.
Woonsocket’s football team also found itself involved in a situation beyond its control. The Novans finished 5-2 in Division II but were eliminated from the playoffs by the league’s rather vague tiebreaker system that can be interpreted one way by league officials and another by various league coaches.
The Division II playoffs are an interesting study in how the Interscholastic League does business. Eight teams from the 16-team league qualify for the postseason. The format makes this the most interesting division to follow during football season. Unfortunately, unbeaten South Kingstown appears invincible this season, and there are no real challengers in the semifinals, as we learned last week when semifinalists Tolman and Cumberland both got clobbered in their Thanksgiving games by lesser opponents. Maybe less can also be more when it comes to how many teams should make the playoffs.
The Interscholastic League does everything within its power to give student-athletes a chance to participate in the playoffs. You could make a case that the league dilutes the product by creating so many divisions and opportunities for teams to win “state” championships.
Back in the good old days, there used to be a natural lull between high school sports seasons in Rhode Island due to a lack of multi-tiered playoffs. The autumn campaign usually ended with Thanksgiving Day football games. Winter sports would begin around Dec. 10. And that season would culminate in early March with various state championship events in basketball and hockey.
In today’s world, there is very little break between the fall and winter sports seasons. The league wants to give its student-athletes as many chances as possible to compete, using crowded regular season schedules and bulky playoff fields to augment its philosophy. As a result, we have autumn sports seasons merging into winter seasons. Wrestlers and basketball players are still playing football while their teammates are preparing for the winter season.
It was not always this way. Up until the early 1970s, there were no Super Bowls in Rhode Island. Heck, we didn’t have Super Bowls in the NFL until 1967. But a new world was opening up in sports and it quickly trickled down to the high school level. A lot of athletes who competed in the pre-Super Bowl era must have been envious of the next generation.
As the state of Rhode Island plummets into an era of economic uncertainty, one wonders if the Interscholastic League will consider cutting back on the length of its seasons, at least until prosperity returns. It’s entirely possible this decision will be made for the league when various government officials begin trimming the amount of money it can provide to towns and cities throughout Rhode Island.
There are other ways to cut back the expenses involved in high school sports. Does it make sense for teams in Pawtucket to bus to Westerly, or Newport, for regular season games, as is done in almost every sport? Might it not be more logical to divide the state into quadrants and confine regular season games to regional schedules?
Perhaps the length of seasons should be considered, too. Does it make sense for girls’ volleyball season to last three months? Or football for nearly four months, counting preseason practice sessions?
Cutting back on high school sports is not something we advocate. In the economic reality of today’s world, it might happen anyway. |
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