BATON ROUGE, La. (WGNO) – A special June meeting has only affirmed what LHSAA principals said in January. Let’s stay split.
The vote was 56.5 percent for keeping the organization split in playoffs in four sports. Football split in January of 2013. In January of this year, LHSAA principals voted to expand the split the playoffs in baseball, softball, and basketball.
The LHSAA said that 306 principals or their proxies were in attendance to vote at the special meeting Wednesday morning in Baton Rouge.
Mandeville principals Bruce Bundy, who proposed a 1.5 enrollment multiplier for select schools, said the LHSAA is going down “the wrong path.”
Bundy’s proposal and three others that would have brought the playoffs back together in some fashion in all or some sports, failed.
“Girls sports will be decimated,” said John Curtis Principal JT Curtis. He noted that select school brackets would be seven teams in softball.
LHSAA Executive Director Eddie Bonine said he was “worried” that as many as 120 private and parochial schools would leave the organization. Bonine said that such a departure would cost the LHSAA approximately $1 million of its $4.4 million budget.
Bonine said he believed the AllState Sugar Bowl would remain as the title sponsor for all LHSAA championships.
Bonine, Bundy, and Curtis all said that the possibility of future legislative action is possible. A vote to end the split failed this spring in the Louisiana House of Representatives.
