The NJSIAA executive committee closed the book on the 2023-24 scholastic sports season by approving next year’s budget, 86 co-op programs (mostly for hockey and swimming) and a new service provider/scheduler for officials: ArbiterSports.
Wednesday’s meeting was held virtually, which typically limits discussion between committee members, and took just over an hour. None of the items on the agenda were challenged.
So what’s next for the NJSIAA in the following 12 months? Here are five of the biggest issues that are either here, or lurking, in New Jersey high school athletics.
Perhaps the biggest thing of note from Wednesday’s meeting was the fact that a bill has appeared in the New Jersey state legislature, sponsored by Sen. Kristin Corrado, for the NJSIAA to adopt a policy on instant replay in state tournament basketball games.
This is a direct response to the controversy over the Manasquan-Camden boys basketball game, when video replay showed Manasquan scored before the final buzzer but the basket was waved off by officials.
It’s not the first time the NJSIAA has been criticized for an error at the end of a marquee event. This columnist has expressed multiple times his desire to see the NJSIAA bring back instant replay, which was previously used in football.
The NJSIAA responded to the outcry after the Camden victory by saying all the rules were followed and there could be no overturning of the outcome. Since then, however, there have been controversies over a baseball state tournament game involving Northern Highlands and anger at the lack of a wind gauge at the sectional track championships.
The NJSIAA is not directly responsible for those issues, but it is accountable for the rules. The next week will see the spring season end with more eyes (and more cameras) on every event. Pray that there’s not a home run near a foul pole, a lacrosse shot off the post, or a race that comes down to a split second.
Would anyone inside the NJSIAA have the idea and courage to vouch for a system in which game results could be changed in the face of overwhelming evidence? The NJSIAA may need to do something to affirm the integrity of its results.
It took less than a year for the NJSIAA’s new transfer rules to be challenged. The NJSIAA largely got out of the transfer business last year by allowing one free transfer for any student who is a freshman, sophomore or junior, but still held seniors to a short sit period.
The idea was a deterrent was needed to keep all the best players from joining forces.
Former Bergen Catholic football coach − and current Syracuse assistant coach − Nunzio Campanile has filed a complaint against the NJSIAA on behalf of his son, who is seeking to transfer to Ramsey as a senior. On the surface, it looks like the NJSIAA shouldn’t discriminate against kids who are seniors and impose a different set of rules on just them.
Fans gripe about college athletes in the transfer portal, who seemingly jump ship every season for a bigger payday, and we’d like to keep high school sports with a veneer of purity. But that ship has sailed. Parents and high school players know that nothing tethers a coach or athletic director from staying in a situation, so why should they?
Girls flag football is about to finish its fourth season as a club sport in New Jersey. The sport has become quite popular. The NJSIAA has kept it as a pilot program for now, but eventually it will become a full-fledged spring sport and take away athletes from other spring sports.
Can small schools maintain spring programs with girls divided among so many programs?
This is one area in which the idea to ease into a sport seems to be working. Schools have started to adopt the sport as an unofficial varsity sport, meaning girls can’t play flag football and softball or track in the spring at the same time. It makes the girls choose. What this will do is weed out the schools that can’t sponsor everything. Will this mean more co-ops for softball, or maybe outdoor track? Probably.
The rise of magnet schools as athletic powerhouses highlighted a loophole that’s long existed in New Jersey high school sports: Schools with small enrollments (but the ability to recruit students) have an inherent advantage over standard Group 1 schools.
There is no clear answer. There are only a handful of charter schools that go this route, and punishing them all by placing them in a bigger group against better competition is not fair to those that haven’t made a strong athletic program a priority. Perhaps the answer is to let charter schools choose which classifications they want to compete in at the State Tournament level.
One of the biggest decisions the NJSIAA made was to abolish the Tournaments of Champions in 2022, believing it was better to have a shorter season for athletes across the board, and that the TOCs had gotten boring with the same teams dominating. (Particularly the non-publics in basketball.)
In retrospect, the TOC was one of the best things the NJSIAA did because it gave the elite teams/players in this state something to strive for.
The NJSIAA is in a tough situation when it comes to high school sports in New Jersey because it has teams that are national powers, but the super majority of programs are just looking to contend in their league and add to a student’s overall educational experience.
The NJSIAA does a good job of providing an environment for those teams, and by staging the Tournament of Champions, it also gave the biggest and best players a showcase as well.
Some decried the TOC because it meant only one team went home happy at the end of the season, but this type of thinking doesn’t give credibility to the coaches and players who had the right perspective and understand that a final score doesn’t determine their true value. The event should be reconsidered.
