History had its eyes on Sun Devil Stadium Dec. 7 as Chandler and Saguaro high schools met for a championship football game that may shape the sport for years to come.
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History had its eyes on Sun Devil Stadium Dec. 7 as Chandler and Saguaro high schools met for a championship football game that may shape the sport for years to come.
Battling the rain, Chandler defeated Saguaro 42-35 at Sun Devil Stadium in the inaugural Open Division championship, a game seeking to define the best team in Arizona.
Despite walking away with a loss, Saguaro coach Jason Mohns said this game was great for Arizona high school football and it provided the Sabercats a chance to legitimize their success.
“We were playing to beat up the best team in Arizona,” he said. “It wasn’t try to win the 4A and have everybody tell us, ‘well, yeah that’s great but these schools are all better than you.’ This was the one true chance to legitimately claim the top spot. There obviously was a ton of excitement around it and for a lot of years, there have been a lot of people that would’ve liked to see that game played.”
The outcome, however, wasn’t only linked to who was the best, but rather the potential future of classification and the playoffs.
The Open Division, which the Arizona Interscholastic Association approved almost a year ago, aimed to pool the top eight big-school teams in the state through a formula utilizing record and strength of schedule. Teams hailed from 4A, 5A and 6A, competing in their own tournament rather than their assigned conference.
This year’s playoffs saw Centennial, Salpointe Catholic, Pinnacle, Horizon, Hamilton and Chaparral high schools join Saguaro and Chandler in the inaugural eight.
AIA Executive Director David Hines says he saw the Open Division experiment as a success because it reached the goals of creating more competition in both the playoffs and regular season as well as promoting the sport in the state.
“Obviously, over the last three years, four years, we’ve had the same six teams in the playoffs at the 4A, 5A and 6A levels,” he said. “The Committee said, ‘we don’t want to know who’s going to win the state championship before the season starts.’”
In recent years, Chandler (6A), Centennial (5A) and Saguaro (4A) dominated their respective state championships by a combined average margin of 26.5 points over the past three years.
This year’s conference championships included matchups between Red Mountain and Liberty high schools at 6A; Williams Field and Campo Verde high schools at 5A; and Mesquite and Desert Edge high schools at 4A.
Conference victors (Liberty, Williams Field and Mesquite) all won by a combined average margin of 10 points though the 6A game saw Liberty win 34-28 in overtime and the 4A game had Mesquite win 28-23. Williams Field won 19-0 in the 5A game.
Williams Field and Desert Edge were the only schools to win a state championship since 2011 while Liberty, Williams Field and Desert Edge each played in a state championship since 2011 and lost.
One challenge, Mr. Hines said he saw, was keeping kids playing football as some schools struggle to compete against the high-octane schools. He said this trial leads to some teams continuing in mediocrity because kids believe they can’t compete and stop playing.
“We can’t afford to lose kids,” he said. “It’s too important for us for kids to stay involved in athletics, not just football but everything. So we’ve got to give kids an opportunity to say, ‘you know what? We may not be the best but we still have a shot. We still have an opportunity to compete.’”
Under review
When the AIA initially approved the new format, there were skeptics both on social media and among some coaches. As the season waned, debates sprouted on social media from pundits and fans regarding who should make it. The excitement seemed to be there.
Notre Dame Preparatory (5A) was consistently in Open Division rankings but a double-overtime loss to Horizon kept the Saints ultimately out, though they hovered near the No. 8 spot through the end of the season.
NDP coach George Prelock said despite not making the Open Division, he saw the concept as good with positive effects outside of the final eight.
“I felt the competitive nature was there [in the 5A playoffs] and it gave more teams and schools opportunities to be in the playoffs, which is always nice,” he said.
A common complaint was the Open Division would disenfranchise the other conference championships. Coach Prelock said he didn’t see it that way.
“Those were the top eight teams as seen by the formula, all the more deserving,” he said. “Whatever bracket we ended up being, that being the 5A, we were ecstatic to be in that and compete for a championship in 5A.”
Providing an Open Division didn’t only seem to benefit the schools left in the conference tournament, but also those who left as Coach Mohns said the team believed it outgrew 4A.
“If you would’ve polled every single person in our program this year, we would have much rather gone to the Open Division rather than play for the 4A,” he said. “Without a doubt, that’s where we want to be.”
Mr. Hines said while there’s always areas the AIA can be better at, there weren’t any glaring issues. In his executive director report at the AIA’s Dec. 9 executive board meeting, Mr. Hines reported AIA staff and the Football Reclassifcation Committee recommended a continuance of the Open Division through the next two-year block.
Looking downfield
When the AIA approved the Open Division, it was in the middle of a classification block. With the reclassification coming up, the AIA will put schools in conferences based on past success rather than enrollment for football.
This move plans for Notre Dame Prep in 6A and Saguaro in 5A. Coach Mohns says as he understands it, the goal is to ultimately put all top-performing teams in 6A regardless of enrollment.
He said enrollment does play a factor, especially when it comes to depth of talent.
Saguaro, he said, is a rare case when it comes to how much Division I talent it has given its size. Scottsdale Unified School District recently reported Saguaro has 1,289 students as of Sept. 6.
“I just think you’ve got to keep using enrollment as a factor and you can’t just go off of success because you’re going to get teams that are good football programs that are stuck in the top division that are good enough to be competitive but not really good enough to compete for a championship,” Coach Mohns said.
“I don’t think that’s fair to a smaller school to get stuck in the top division where they’re really playing with a major disadvantage to schools like the big schools, like the big 6A schools that have 4,000 kids, have all the advantages of open enrollment and transfers plus naturally have 3,000 more kids coming to their school.”
Schools that made the open division had the following populations, according to the AIA:
Hamilton: 4,034;
Chandler: 3,358;
Pinnacle: 2,598;
Chaparral: 2,350;
Horizon: 2,197;
Centennial: 1,982; and
Salpointe Catholic: 1,212.
Mr. Hines says the Open Division will likely continue through the next two years. He said there are schools in the state athletes gravitate toward, thus, in his mind, necessitating an Open Division.
“I do think over a period of three, four, five years, we may get more people competing in conferences that are more like themselves,” he said. “But in the 6A, there’s no place for them to go, so the elite of the 6A, they’re going to be some of the top programs.”
Coach Mohns’ concerns on reclassification center on what he perceives as a push to get the best schools to 6A. He thought the Open Division was a good mix of keeping enrollment while pitting top teams against each other.
A change could mess with the selection formula, he said, since all the teams who would make the Open Division could come from 6A, putting 5A and 4A schools at disadvantage since they aren’t playing as tough teams.
“I don’t know, with the Open Division, you necessarily need to continue to move all the teams up into one division,” he said.
“You’re going to put teams at a serious competitive disadvantage when you have small schools play large schools every single week of the season. You rely on depth to get through that if you have to do that week in and week out.”
Notre Dame Prep has a population of 837 but plays in 5A. Coach Prelock said his team would love to compete at the highest levels but reality sometimes prevents that in regards to depth of talent pool.
“I know everyone is going to say, ‘oh, your record shows well.’ Our record came with a lot of hard work and a lot of sacrifices and some luck,” he said.
“The fact of the matter is we’ve been able to stay pretty healthy and only had one or two serious injuries that were season-ending for our players. When you stay healthy, it’s easy. When you compete against some schools that have so much, it makes it a little more challenging when you have to play them, especially schools that have the ability to platoon, which is a luxury we do not have.”
With the perceived success of the Open Division, Mr. Hines said the AIA may look to expand it to other sports though there are no concrete plans to do so.
Regardless of what the future holds, Coach Mohns says his team wants to be the best. In order to get there, the Sabercats plan to follow the mantra of former professional wrestler Ric Flair, which is “to be the man, you’ve got to beat the man.”
Seeing Saguaro hold its own against Chandler, an opportunity provided through the Open Division, should help motivate his returning players who may have been on the fence regarding beating those bigger schools, Coach Mohns says.
“So that’s it. Now we just have to set our sights higher,” he said.
“We know what it looks like. We know what it feels like. We just have to use that as motivation in the offseason to just elevate our program to the next step.”
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