Competitive balance: How the OHSAA calculates competitive balance, and why it matters
Bailey JohnsonEvery two years, the Ohio High School Athletic Association releases updated tournament division assignments based on enrollment data from the Ohio Department of Education's Education Management Information System (EMIS).
But football, soccer, volleyball, basketball, baseball and softball receive updated divisions each season as a result of competitive balance, which is calculated every year.
The competitive balance system is, at its core, a simple concept, but the calculations and terminology surrounding it can be confusing or unclear. And because competitive balance affects which divisions teams compete in, it's an important concept for Ohio high school sports fans to understand.
Here are answers to some of the most commonly asked questions about competitive balance.
What is competitive balance?
Competitive balance is an alteration to the OHSAA's tournament division assignment bylaw that was adopted in 2014. Bylaw 2, Section 2 of the OHSAA bylaws contains seven subsections that detail the requirements of the competitive balance plan.
The OHSAA first introduced a competitive balance bylaw in 2011 as part of the organization's annual voting cycle. The initial version of the bylaw failed, and altered versions failed in 2012 and 2013 before a fourth version passed by a narrow 411-323 vote in 2014.
Competitive balance was initially set to be implemented for the 2016-17 school year, but it was delayed to 2017-18 after delays in development and testing of the software required to manage the enrollment data.
Why did the OHSAA introduce competitive balance?
After years of complaints that private schools had an unfair advantage in the state tournaments, often led by allegations of recruiting, the OHSAA sought a solution. The introduction of competitive balance adjusts the enrollment count for affected sports with the goal of leveling the playing field between public and private schools.
Which sports are affected by competitive balance?
The fall has the most competitive balance sports with four: football, boys soccer, girls soccer and girls volleyball. In the winter, boys and girls basketball are the only two sports that use competitive balance. Baseball and softball are affected by competitive balance in the spring, though the 2021 alignments didn't use competitive balance data because there was no 2020 season due to the pandemic.
Competitive balance implementation is limited to team sports with multiple tournament divisions.
How does the OHSAA calculate competitive balance?
Each student on the roster of a given sport is assigned a multiplier that correlates to how long they've been enrolled in the same public school district or system of education. Tier 0 students have a multiplier of zero, Tier 1 students have a multiplier of 1 and Tier 2 students have a multiplier of three for football and seven for the other sports.
For every sport except football, all students on the team's tournament roster, plus any students who appeared in a varsity game during the regular season, must be included on the roster for competitive balance purposes. In football, all students in grades 10-12 plus any freshmen who appeared in a regular-season game must be entered.
To be considered a Tier 0 student, a student and at least one parent must currently reside in the school district for a single-school district or in the attendance zone of the school in question for a multi-school district.
Students in a single-school district who do not live in the district but have maintained enrollment in the district since the beginning of seventh grade are considered Tier 1. In a multi-school district, Tier 1 students are those who live outside the attendance zone of their chosen school but within the district or who have maintained enrollment since the beginning of seventh grade.
Tier 2 students are the remaining students who don't meet the criteria to be a Tier 0 or Tier 1.
Things get a little more complicated for non-public schools.
If a student hasn't maintained continuous enrollment in the same system of education since the start of seventh grade, they're a Tier 2 student.
If a student has attended the high school's designated feeder school since the beginning of seventh grade and maintained enrollment in the same education system, they're a Tier 0 student.
Tier 1 students at non-public schools are students who didn't attend the high school's feeder school but have been in the same broader system of education since the beginning of seventh grade.
After each student on a roster is assigned their tier, the multiplier is applied to produce the additional roster count. That number is then added to the EMIS enrollment count to produce the final, adjusted enrollment count.
EMIS data includes all students in grades 9 through 11 at a school and is re-calculated every two years. Competitive balance numbers are re-calculated every year.
Has competitive balance worked in Ohio?
Private schools make up approximately 16% of the OHSAA member schools. Fall sports have five seasons with competitive balance, while winter and spring have four due to the COVID-19 pandemic canceling the 2020 winter state tournaments and entire spring season.
Through the 2021-22 season, public schools have won a total 67.1% of the state championships, 100 of 149, since competitive balance was implemented. Before competitive balance, using five seasons of data for fall and four for winter and spring, public schools won 51.35%, 76 of 148. (Football added a seventh division in 2013, leaving one season in this data with six football state champions instead of seven.)
In fall alone, public schools won 30 of 84 state championships before competitive balance (35.7%) and 54 of 85 since (63.53%). The difference is much less notable in winter, where only one additional public school has won a state championship in the four years since competitive balance was implemented.
Interestingly, an additional private school won a state championship in the spring season after competitive balance was implemented. There were six private state champions between baseball and softball from 2018-22 (2020 not included) and only five from 2014-17.
Within the fall season, only football and soccer saw increases in the number of public schools winning state titles, while volleyball saw the number of private state champions increase from 10 in 2012-16 to 12 in 2017-21.
With the acknowledgement that it's still a small sample size, so far, the data shows that football and soccer are the only sports in which there has been a significant increase in the number of public schools winning state championships.