North Carolina High School Athletics, a Deep Dive

North Carolina High School Athletic Association logo photo credits: NCHSAA. “The NCHSAA is the governing body of high school sports in North Carolina. They control conferences, classifications, and playoff brackets,” Dustin Kerley speaking about the role of the NCHSAA within North Carolina.

Ian Biles, Feature Desk Lead for the Powderhorn 

Why are private schools competing against public schools in high school sports?  The question often asked by athletes, parents, and fans of high school athletics in North Carolina has a hard to pin down answer. While the current system has been in place for many years, fans, coaches, and student athletes often raise questions about the fairness of these competitions.  

Those who argue against the current system believe that the difference in funding, resources, and recruitment ability between public and private high schools is too great to allow them to face each other outside of regular season competition.  In contrast, many supporters of the current structure view private vs public competition as a way to stimulate and increase the quality of North Carolina’s high school athletics, while also allowing private schools to have more variety in their competition. 

Dustin Kerley, Athletic Director for Watauga High School, has been in and around North Carolina high school athletics since 2009 as both a coach and athletic director for the middle and high school level. Additionally, Kerley serves on the board of directors for the North Carolina High School Athletics Association [NCHSAA], the governing body of high school sports within the state. As a board member, Kerley has insight into the inner workings of conference alignment, and regulations surrounding private schools. Conference alignment, according to Kerley, is an important way the NCHSAA promotes equality within competition.

“ In North Carolina, the NCHSAA realigns our conferences every four years,” said Kerley. “They set up classifications based on the school’s ADM, which basically means the number of students enrolled in the school. From this number, the school is classified 1-8a. After deciding the classification, teams are sorted into conferences based on geography. We do this to maintain parity so that schools that have 800 students aren’t playing schools with 3000 students.”

Kerley emphasized the NCHSAA’s main purpose is to maintain fairness within the sports it regulates over. The NCHSAA does not automatically govern private schools. However, special exceptions are often made to benefit these non-public schools. 

“Private schools or charter schools have to apply to the North Carolina High School Athletic Association to be part of the membership,” said Kerley.  “They have a process for that where they look at that application and determine whether they would let that school serve as part of the North Carolina High School Athletic Association. If the school doesn’t apply to be in the NCHSAA, they are governed by the other organization [The North Carolina Independent School Athletic Association] and only play against other private schools. Most of them eventually want to get into the NCHSAA because it's so much bigger, and it allows them to diversify their competition.”  

The current application process has been in place for 50 years, with some schools, such as Charlotte Catholic, having participated in the NCHSAA since the early 70’s. Although it is an established system, many fans argue that allowing for the NCHSAA to become the overall governing body, instead of allowing the public and private schools to be governed separately, is harmful to public schools. One notable concern among critics of the system is the ability of private schools to “recruit players,” a resource not available to public schools. 

“If you live in Watauga County, and you're a high school age student, we have to serve you at Watauga High School,” said Kerley.  “When you get into the athletic side of things, some people will claim that private schools might recruit or might have less restrictions as far as who they can get to come to their school and that sometimes they gain an athletic advantage. I try to always take the stance of that's not something we can control here. We can control what we can control, do what we're capable of doing, and complaining about whether a private school can or can't recruit or does or doesn't recruit, has nothing to do with us.”

Historically, Watauga has had mixed results against these large private schools. While football defeated Charlotte Catholic in last year's football playoffs, both soccer and lacrosse suffered defeats in their meetings with the school. Wyatt Shanklin, a sophomore and two-year Varsity member of the Watauga High School Men’s Lacrosse team, says that he enjoys the extra challenge and encouragement that comes with facing large private schools.

“When we played [Charlotte Catholic High School] last year in the playoffs I felt like it was obvious we were doomed to lose from the start,” said Shanklin. “But I thought the game was helpful because it showed our team what we could be if we worked for it.  If we’re determined, and the program continues to grow, one day we could rival or even beat them.”

Ike Mance, a senior and four year member of the WHS men’s lacrosse team, shares Kerley and Shanklin’s sentiment regarding the ability of public schools to compete with private schools. However, Mance differs in his opinion on the current structure of the NCHSAA.

“I think that the question isn’t ‘can we compete with private schools,’ it's ‘should we have to compete against them in a playoff format,” said Mance. “I think that we should keep them separate in terms of playoff games. Having public schools play private schools in non-conference games during the season is good, but those same schools competing against each other in a playoff environment shouldn’t be happening, especially with the resource disparity that can happen between public and private schools.”