Hillcrest staying in 5A

Common sense doesn’t seem to be in common supply with the UHSAA board of trustees. I came to that conclusion after seeing them shoot down Hillcrest’s request to switch from 5A to 4A for the 2010-11 school year.

Hillcrest never had a chance. The school could not garner even a majority of votes on a motion to move to 4A. Students, coaches and parents in the community have to feel outraged by the decision because it does not reflect the best interest of the school or the community at large.

The fact is Hillcrest is getting beat up playing larger 5A schools – like Alta for example – in every sport. Football injuries are adversely affecting other sports like football, basketball, baseball and track. The Huskies are competitive in some sports like girl’s soccer. But things will not improve from a competitive standpoint or an injury standpoint across the board as long as they are in 5A.

The numbers do not support keeping Hillcrest in 5A. Since enrolling 1488 students in October, 2008, enrollment numbers have dropped to just 1,397 students this month. That is not the numbers of a 5A school on raw figures alone. When you take into account the percentage of special-needs students who can’t compete in athletics, the actual pool of students to draw on for sports teams dips even further.

The most mystifying part of the whole matter is that all of the Region 4 principals and the entire Canyons School District board support Hillcrest moving to 4A. Not to mention a whole host of Hillcrest parents and students. None of that seemed to matter to a number of trustees — many of whom were from 3A, 2A and 1A regions — who seemed to care more about problems in their own part of the state than anything else.

It would be easy to say that Hillcrest should just deal with it. But the fact is that keeping a school in a classification based one enrollment figure from a couple years ago — without accounting for the makeup of the student body itself — is just not smart when it is detrimental to that school.

The question is how well can Hillcrest survive another year or two in 5A? Based on what I’ve seen and heard, safety and morale could be a huge issue for the Huskies over the next couple of seasons in multiple sports.

What are your thoughts on the decision to leave Hillcrest in 5A? Do you agree with it or not?

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