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The divide between Pa.s public and private high school sports For years, theres been tension between private schools competing against Pennsylvanias public schools in the PIAA playoffs.
A new law could change this.
For years, theres been tension between private schools competing against Pennsylvanias public schools in the PIAA playoffs.
A new law could change this.
The Public and Catholic Leagues have dominated the PIAA state playoffs since joining in 2008.
A new law proposes separate playoffs and championships for public and private schools.
Philadelphia Catholic League basketball was a fixture for Kevin Grugan a mild obsession, even throughout his childhood.
Growing up in, he had deep and natural ties to Father Judges program in particular.His uncle, Ron Sawacki, was an assistant under legendary head coach Bill Fox, and Grugan competed in Judges summer basketball camps, went to the Crusaders games on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons in the winter, and graduated from the school in 1996.
High Schools administration hired him to teach math and assist Gregg Downer, the schools longtime boys basketball coach.
The subsequent years have not reignited his nostalgia for the old days of Northeast Philly hoops.In fact, in his role as a coach at a suburban public school, Grugan has come to resent what he perceives as an uneven playing field throughout Pennsylvania sports.
Parochial, private, and charter schools, after all, dont have borders; they can draw their students, and their student-athletes, from anywhere.
Public schools cant.High school athletics is about building a team, building a culture, Grugan said recently.
Youre devising competition.
Youre learning from that competition.
Youre trying to improve on the next game.But you go into those events, and suddenly standing across from you are multiple if not five Division I athletes.
You cant watch enough film to find that very secret flaw that nobody else has found.
Grugans complaints have become common among Pennsylvanias public school coaches, administrators, parents, and players since the Catholic League and Public League moved under the jurisdictional umbrella of the PIAA in the fall of 2008.And that fierce debate about fairness could soon be cast in stark relief.
, which would allow the PIAA to establish separate playoffs and championships for athletics for boundary schools and non-boundary schools.
The Pennsylvania Senate can vote on the bill at any time but has not yet.
A spokesperson for Gov.said that the Shapiro administration is monitoring the bill as it moves through the legislative process but did not have a position on it.Its difficult to find a state issue that provokes such strong viewpoints and often-strident opinions.
And this issue has plenty of big-picture and hyper-local tentacles, including the professionalization and commodification of high school sports, the question of athletics appropriate purpose and role in secondary education, and accusations that some non-boundary schoolsAll were trying to do is say that part of high school sports is teaching kids how to play a fair game, Rep.Scott Conklin , who introduced House Bill No.
41 and represents the 77th district, in State College, said in a phone interview.Its something they can use for the rest of their lives.
We dont want to teach them that there are two sets of rules: one set for a boundary school, one for a non-boundary school.
Conklin cited player safety, particularly within football, as a primary reason for House Bill No.
41, arguing that non-public schools can attract more athletes and more athletes who are bigger, stronger, and faster than their public opponents can.The boundary school may have 18 really good players; they play offense and defense, he said.
By the second quarter, those kids are tired, and thats when children get hurt: when theyre gassed.
When it comes to competition in team sports, especially football and basketball, the private, charter, and parochial schools have been dominant in state playoffs in recent years.He did not provide any statistical evidence to support this claim, and in a Dec.
3, 2024, memo he circulated to state House members to introduce the bill, he made it clear another factor was just as important, if not more so.When it comes to competition in team sports, especially football and basketball, Conklin wrote, the private, charter, and parochial schools have been dominant in state playoffs in recent years.
Among the highest-profile sports, that dominance hasnt been quite as severe as Conklin suggested.
Consider these results since the beginning of the fall 2008 sports season:, based on non-boundary schools success and the number of transfer students they accept, that can allow teams to move up in enrollment classification.Still, St.
Josephs Prep, with an all-male enrollment of roughly 900 and without a football stadium on itscampus, has won seven PIAA Class 6A championships in the last 10 years while competing alongside the states biggest public schools, including North Penn, which has more than 3,000 students.
Whats more, a recent donationfrom Prep alumnus and billionaire entrepreneur Nick Howley is likely to help the Hawks separate themselves further from the 6A field.Theyre just two different structures, Prep president John Marinacci said.
All our student-athletes, whether it be football or anything else, come from the same geographic locations that our whole student body comes from.
I know there are allegations out there that we have students from all over America.
You know where the Prep is.Its 15 minutes from Jersey.
Do we have kids who play football who come from Jersey? We do.
We also have a lot of kids who play other sports or dont play sports who come from Jersey.The geographic reach of the school is what it is.
Were a regional school.
to allow non-public schools to participate in postseason and championship events with public schools, and some private and parochial institutions have been members of PIAA leagues and conferences for years.
When eight Delaware Valley schools came together to foundCatholic and St.
Pius X, and the members of the all-girls Catholic Academies League have long competed against suburban Philadelphia public schools within PIAA District One.The issue took on increased salience both in the region and throughout Pennsylvania, though, when the Catholic and Public Leagues entered the PIAA 18 years ago.
At the time, association members who might have raised questions about competitive fairness were cautioned against making any such case, according to a source who was directly involved in negotiating and implementing the expansion.
If they did, the legislature would take steps to strip the PIAA of much of its power, oversight, and relevance.Almost every legislators child went to a non-public school, the source said, and everybody wants to have that state-championship medal.
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They said, Dont try us, cause were coming.
So the Catholic and Public Leagues formed District 12, and the inclusion of the Public League counterbalanced the injection of private-school strength into the association only so much.
The Public League today has 73 member schools.But nearly half of them 34 are charters, among them football and boys basketball powerhouse Imhotep, and thes open-enrollment policy can allow exceptional athletes to attend just about any high school and compete for any coaches or programs they want.
For the two leagues, the ostensible reasoning that justified joining the PIAA still stands up.It would lead to more fulfilling experiences for student-athletes: better competition, travel outside the limits of the city and the suburbs that ring it, perhaps more exposure to and interaction with recruiters and, of course, the opportunity to call themselves state champions.Id go to college and hear somebody say, We beat Neshaminy in a state championship game, said Father Judge basketball coach Chris Roantree, who won a Catholic League boys championship as a player with the Crusaders in 1997 before guiding them to back-to-back PCL titles and a PIAA Class 6A championship over the last two years.
Id be like, We played Neshaminy and beat them by 50.
Are you really a state champion? Heres the thing: Philly is Philly.So if you want all the Philly kids to go to public schools, theyre still going to dominate.
Theres so much talent in Philadelphia that it doesnt matter where it goes.
Thats a disadvantage for us.
There are six, seven, eight, 10 good teams in the Catholic League.If theyre in the playoffs, theyre going to make some noise in the states.
Theres a lot of good players spread out.
I laugh at it sometimes, but we can only control what we can control.
The Catholic and Public Leagues, loaded with student-athletes who have chosen to attend and play for their respective schools, have another advantage over the publics: They are in alignment with the generational shifts and trends throughout youth sports, as young athletes and their parents crave more freedom and place greater importance on AAU, club, and travel teams.We need to be looking at increasing the opportunities for kids, District One chairman Mike Barber said.
If not, theyre going to find other places to play.
Its difficult to deny that, in this modern landscape, the PIAA benefits from the presence of private, parochial, and charter schools, that these programs infuse the associations competition with more talent and prestige.What they do is unbelievable, Central Bucks East girls basketball coach Liz Potash said.
We played Archbishop Carroll in our Christmas tournament, and you watch that scout film, and youre like, Oh, my gosh! This is unbelievable.
I have all the respect in the world for those programs.Where it gets me is in the postseason, when I have to compete for the same championship.
Then its just not a level playing field.
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Ill play them in-season.
I have no issue with that.But when I have to compete for the same championship, theres a disparity there, and I think obviously everyone is aware of that.
The reality that non-boundary schools can and do pull students from New Jersey, Delaware, and the suburbs that feed District Ones public schools has stoked plenty of us-vs.-them tension.
Potash herself admitted to rooting for Perkiomen Valley during its run to the 2025 Class 6A girls hoops championship, and when CB East beat.District One and District 12 hate each other, one area athletic director said, though Starr Davenport, the Philadelphia School Districts director of finance for athletics, tried to soften that assertion by drawing on a familiar rivalry as an analogy.
You can compare it to almost Dallas vs.
the Eagles, she said.
We dont really hate them.
Its a healthy, quasi-toxic athletic approach to, Were better than District One.
Its the proximity.
Its the ongoing battles that are close.
It gets to the point where its one vs.
the other, but I think theres harmony and respect across both districts.
The irony and, for many public school coaches, the frustration is that the traditional city and neighborhood rivalries within the Catholic and Public Leagues mean more to some coaches, players, and fans than the district and state tournaments do.The rollicking sellout crowds filling the Palestra every year for the PCL boys basketball semifinals and the boys and girls championship games have been just the most obvious example.We want to win the Pub, West Philly High boys basketball coach Adrian Burke said in February, before his team lost to Imhotep in this years Public League championship game.
Its legendary.
Youre talking about some of the greatest basketball players ever.
Youre talking about Wilt Chamberlain, Gene Banks.I could on and on and on.
When you think about the Public League, you think about all those guys who paved the way for us to play.
Splitting the PIAA playoffs into boundary and non-boundary brackets would not be unprecedented, but it would be unusual.
New Jersey is one of four states that allows public and private schools to compete during regular seasons but keeps them separate for postseasons,conducted earlier this year by the USA Today Network.Another four states, including Maryland, dont permit boundary and non-boundary schools to play against each other.
Grugan wouldnt mind such a measure, wouldnt mind seeing House Bill No.
41 signed into law and put into effect.
Lower Merion won its last state title in 2013, and in 2019 and every year from 2021 through 2025, it lost in the state playoffs to either Roman Catholic or Archbishop Wood.
The question that he, Rep.Conklin, and everyone involved or interested in Pennsylvania high school sports has to ask and answer is this: Is it better to have lost to these non-boundary teams or never to have played them at all? How Andre Noble, a Boston native, became an all-time Philadelphia high school coach: He got immersed into it We keep making these decisions based on the idea that all high school athletes are performing at this high Division I level, Grugan said, and my thing is, most of the high school athletes youre coaching are going to have a high school basketball experience and thats it.And by the way, thats a great thing.
That is going to teach them so many lessons, and theyll be able to thrive in other situations in their lives with amazing memories.
We still celebrate big games by getting pizza.
Thats as good a moment as anything were going to produce on the court.I write columns and deeper stories here, talk about Philly sports on the radio, and write books in my spare time.