The harm of Wisconsin’s ‘competitive balance’ program

Recently, I went back to Wisconsin for a friend’s wedding. This friend was a grade below me at Darlington High School in Wisconsin, and we were both cross country runners.

As with most cross country weddings, our high school coach Arnie Miehe, or just “coach” to most people, attended. While he’s no longer the coach, his 41-year legacy left a mark in the Wisconsin high school running world.

He was named to the Cross Country Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2005, before winning six straight boys cross country titles from 2011-2016. The first two were my junior and senior years of high school, and my husband Patrick was on the 2012 winning team.

Coach won eight boys titles during his time and one girls title. My senior year, the girls placed second to Spring Valley by two points. We were the first girls program to bring home a top-two finish, but they finally got the gold in 2016.

This year, coached by Miehe’s son, the girls brought home Darlington’s second championship.

Being a sports reporter and former runner, Coach and I always get to talking about sports when we run into each other - specifically cross country.

We talk about how different it is from Iowa to Wisconsin. “They don’t run Saturday morning meets,” I say. He’s shocked. Almost all Wisconsin meets occur on Saturday mornings while very few are on weekday afternoons. Here it’s the opposite.

“They have people giving them water during the race,” I say, still feeling this is unnecessary during such a short race.

This time, he told me about a new program in Wisconsin called “competitive balance.” It affects all sports except track & field and swimming & diving, both designated as “individual sports.”

In this system, programs are given points for various achievements. Collect six points in three years and be bumped up a division.

Bracketed sports like baseball, basketball, 11-player football, hockey, soccer, softball, volleyball and wrestling earn points as follows:

1 point for advancing to the state quarterfinal, sectional final or Level 3 11-player FB, (final 8 teams)

2 points for advancing to the state semifinal (final 4 teams)

3 points for advancing to the championship game

4 points for winning a state title

Sports like cross country earn points as follows:

1 point for qualifying for the state meet

2 points for placing 3rd or 4th place at the state meet or for Sectional Champion

3 points for winning the state runner up

4 points for winning the state title

During my high school career, the best we finished at state was second place. From freshman to senior year we placed 13th, fifth, third and second. However, we were Sectional Meet (like Iowa’s state-qualifying meet) Champions all four years.

Darlington is a town of 2,400 people. My graduating class was 59 kids, yet our cross country program had more than 30 girls and 30 boys. Darlington is a cross country town.

If “competitive balance” had been a thing when I was in high school, we would have accumulated six points my first three years just for being Sectional Champions. We would have been a D2 team my senior year, and wouldn’t have placed second.

If Iowa had competitive balance, our wrestling team would have been in Class 3A last year because we would have had one point for eighth place in 2021-22, one point for fifth place in 2022-23 and four points for winning in 2023-24.

Even though the team graduated 11 starters, it wouldn’t have mattered. They would have been forced to compete with teams like Southeast Polk, Bettendorf and Indianola.

This “competitive balance” idea was aimed at complaints of private schools winning over and over because they are allowed to recruit. Instead of helping the rural schools competing against big-city small private schools, this policy has instead punished successful programs.

Creston isn’t good at wrestling because of recruitment or an unfair advantage, just as Darlington isn’t good at cross country for the same reasons.

Creston has always been good because they are disciplined. They put the time in and coach Cody Downing makes sure of it. You want to sit on the bench in wrestling, you’re still going to earn it every day in the wrestling room.

The same went for Darlington cross country. We were expected to track every mile in the summer. Our minimum was 150 miles. My senior year, I nearly hit 350 miles. I was running 50 miles a week at the end of the summer to try to hit that goal.

The only way for a program to go back down a class is by not having six points over the past three years. It takes three years for points to fall off your program’s total.

How did such a thing pass? Well there’s no downside to big schools because they can’t go up a division, so there was nothing at stake for them. I hope the WIAA comes around to see this program does nothing but discourage dedication and hard work in small schools.