George Orwell and High School Sports

You would think that George Orwell and high school sports are two subjects that would never come together on the same page, and you would probably be right most of the time. But these are strange times, and the British author would easily recognize many of his favorite themes that have shown up in an official effort to level the high school playing field known as “competitive equity”. This term refers to a practice promoted by the California Interscholastic Federation, now common in many areas of state, of taking historically successful teams and making them compete in play-off competition against higher competition and taking less successful teams and lowering their level of competition. Nothing very earth shattering, to be sure. Yet, when put into practice it often creates a system that punishes a sports team for working very hard and being successful by making them compete against much larger schools, and, in turn, rewards some less successful teams from larger schools by letting them compete for championships against smaller schools. This is the type of Orwellian logic that the author outlined in his depictions of totalitarian thinking in both 1984 and Animal Farm. I coach a small, rural high school girl’s basketball team. Despite our small numbers, we were very successful for a long period because we worked very hard and adhered to a policy of hard work, commitment, and vision that helped us to produce ten section championships. Then the local CIF office stepped in and decided that we had won more than our share of championships and decided it was time to make us compete at against larger schools. (We have always played stronger programs, but we now were made to compete for the championships against them.) We graduated six veteran players off of our last championship team in 2010. The next season, we were forced to compete against a team from a school with twice our school population and were knocked out of the section play-offs in the first round for the first time ever. The following year we made it to the second round of play-offs but were then eliminated by a school three times larger than ours. A similar sized school in our league, which we had beaten twice, made it to the finals of our old division. The CIF referred to this idea of having a different team winning the championship in our old division as “writing new stories”. Our new story was that our team was forced to watch from the stands during last two year’s play-offs because of our success in previous years. In our dealings with the CIF, we have often run across such terminology as “there isn’t any language” in place for an appeal, or “ your appeal doesn’t meet the criteria”. This is Orwellian double speak at its finest. They consistently fail to recognize the irony involved in the fact that they placed us into a division that we do not naturally belong and where we cannot compete successfully (our subsequent record more than proves this), wrote the language for such placement and set the criteria for appeal, and then deny us a fair opportunity based on the language and criteria they themselves created. Orwell started out with strong Marxist leanings. He was then exposed to the perfidy of Stalinist thinking during the Spanish Civil War where he was almost killed for not going along with the plans. He left Spain a committed opponent of totalitarian thinking and of the idea that soulless bureaucracies have the capability to solve social injustice. He put his views down on paper in a searing indictment of the negative consequences of what happens when bureaucrats try to make people equal on paper. The result is “paper equality” where another person or group must penalized for having strong work habits, better organization, and success. This has been proven the case in the sport’s arenas in our area. In championship play, many large urban schools have been granted opportunities to beat up on smaller rural schools and programs that have had a history of success were eliminated from competition because they had to play much larger schools. The true irony of the situation is that the idea of fairness and true equity of competition is at the center of the CIF mission. Yet, for three years now, my team and others like us have systematically been denied a fair chance to compete against other schools of similar size. This has hurt us in our efforts to get the younger kids to come out and commit to the rigorous training involved to win championships, it has also hurt our program financially as we no longer get to host or participate in play-off games, and it has undermined my player’s trust in the core belief that all their hard work and commitment will be justly rewarded come play-off time. I find personally find it offensive that the officials of our local office of the CIF can hypocritically extol the virtue of fair play when they have obviously have so little understanding of what it means.