Here was my rationale regarding private school concerns that others have raised in multiple posts. Again I could be completely mistaken but here's what I was thinking when drawing these up.
Private schools are multiplied unofficially in some cases under this proposal but it is by the private schools themselves not the IHSA. For example in 8A if it was felt that St. Rita was too small to compete in 8A they could be replaced with Benet, Carmel, Fenwick, or even St. Ignatius. That is up to the private schools to determine themselves and not the IHSA which I thought would be appealing. Ultimately we could create a scenario where no private schools play in 8A if we are using true enrollment numbers but I felt that would be a detriment to those schools for recruiting purposes and that they would actually prefer to play up in higher classes.
St. Rita and Mt. Carmel are interesting case studies because under the current district proposal they would be grouped with mostly CPS schools. What happens when those schools refuse to play and just forfeit the game? We could be looking at a possibility where Mt. Carmel and St. Rita have multiple forfeit weeks which is what currently happens in the CPS with some schools. Even if that isn't the case, these games will be so noncompetitive that I can't seeing it as being beneficial to these two programs.
For Boylan I felt that since historically they have played many 7A teams in their conference each year that they would prefer to continue that setup.
For Bishop Mac and IC I felt the same thing applied. For Bishop Mac they could always be moved down to 3A and at least play some similar sized local schools. For IC though I believe they would also be facing a lot more travel and potentially a CPS schedule of some schools as well. My understanding is that private schools would prefer to play each other even at the expense of having to play a class or two up but I could easily be mistaken on that opinion.
Finally the reason why I skipped over 4A and 3A with the privates is that the remaining private schools seemed as an average to be a 2A grouping. Does that mean 4A schools will play 1A schools? Yes it does. But I thought that these schools would fit best as one grouping. Perhaps it would work better based on pure geography, but again private schools lose their private school rivalries.
