Starting in 2024, there’s going to be some changes for the Prescott girls’ golf team as they pursue their fifth consecutive state championship.

The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association's Competitive Balance Plan will be implemented en force next season as teams across the state will no longer be separated into divisions based on school population alone. Teams like Prescott, who have had a lot of success over the last few years will now be moved up to Division 1 where they will compete with schools and co-ops that draw from student bodies that are exponentially larger.

With this new initiative came an appeals process for districts that believe they should not be included. Chad Salay, head coach of the Cardinals, along with Athletic Director Andrew Caudill worked through this process in an effort to keep Prescott in Division 2, a position that is fundamentally more appropriate for them.

Their appeal addressed the illogical nature of their team’s inclusion in this initiative, but it ultimately fell on deaf ears from the Classification Committee who heard the appeal.

“We are a school that has 420 kids. Green Bay, for example, co-ops their entire district, so they have like 5,000 kids in their pool. That's more people than the population of Prescott. Not to mention the multiple schools that have over 2,000 kids,” Salay said.

High school sports are cyclical for everybody. Each year, schools lose and gain players. However, a small town like Prescott is far less likely to maintain their unprecedented elite level of success from the past five years than the private schools pulling from much larger populations who won it for the 17 straight years before that. That’s right, 17 straight seasons without a public school winning until Prescott did.

Salay says he feels like they’re just getting caught in the crossfire.

“It starts with a small group of people making the most noise complaining about how their small community can't compete with these private school communities because of XYZ advantages that they are perceived to have, and finally the WIAA decided to put together this initiative,” Salay said. “In some cases, it's obviously true that they certainly have some advantages compared to small towns, but to me, it's just kind of shameful. It just goes back to, you know, everyone deserves a trophy. I think it's just people wanting things handed to them these days, they don't want to work for it.”

These private schools typically tend to be in higher populated areas like Eau Claire, La Crosse, and Madison (bigger cities), which generally means they have a higher probability of creating and maintaining a championship caliber program.

“Yes, maybe they do have some of those advantages like anybody has advantages over anyone else, but are you going to put in the work to overcome that? Because we did,” Salay said. “Are we going to change all these rules to be the only or one of the only states that has this competitive balance initiative? To me, that's just crazy, but that's where we're at.”

In the past five years, only on a single occasion has a public school challenged Prescott in the state tournament, the rest were all private schools. Ironically, now that this initiative has “balanced” Prescott out of D2, it’ll go back to private schools - the actual target of this movement - winning every year again.

The problem isn’t with the system they’ve developed to combat this perceived problem, Salay says, because you have to have a way to judge, and you can’t predict the future. He says the problem with it, beyond the complete lack of supposed logic that balance can be created by putting schools with 400 kids up against the athletic departments from Madison, Green Bay and Milwaukee, is that the path back to your previous division is long and arduous.

As per the new rules, if a team experiences even a modicum of success in D1 next fall, the soonest they could go back to D2 is 2027. That means, with a team as good as Prescott’s is, there’s almost no chance that this situation will resolve itself in the near future.

“So, if we make it to state next year, which I fully expect us to do, we're stuck there for three more years, and in three years, I'm going to have a whole different team. It's a little unfair that way. I don't like the initiative in general, but I especially don't like that point because I think that's too penalizing for future teams,” Salay said. “This is especially true in a small town where turnover is more volatile because we don't have as many kids, and things change so much year to year. Whereas, if you're drawing from 5,000 kids, you're just not going to have as much volatility.”

Another fundamental issue is due to a violation of the new initiative’s bylaws by the Competitive Balance Committee itself. As per the rules, this committee was supposed to appoint a secondary “Classification Committee” to hear the appeals. Instead, they appointed themselves as judge, jury and executioner thus creating an inherently biased system for which schools have no avenue for redress if they believe their new placement is wrong.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that they roundly refused to admit any fault in their initial judgment of teams. In fact, their first action as a Classification Committee was to immediately reject every single appeal out of hand except one.

Coach Salay, with the help of Caudill, spent in excess of 50 hours preparing the form this committee sent out, and their appeal delineates the numerous reasons why this initiative doesn’t and shouldn’t apply to Prescott.

“We spent countless hours putting together this appeal for, on principle, what we believe is wrong, and it was just immediately denied. The kicker of it all was that they didn't give us any reason. AC actually had to reach out to them for any type of reason,” Salay said.

The reason they eventually gave back to Salay and Caudill was a statement that they are looking for “extenuating circumstances.”

“It was super vague because they didn't say what an extenuating circumstance was, and to me, the eight points that they had us write about were all extenuating circumstances,” Salay said. “It was kind of just a slap in the face. If you're just going to deny it all, shove this through and everybody's going to go up, just tell me that. That does not sit well with me still.”

In the face of all the hubbub about this new initiative, there is one clear solution to everyone’s problems. Well, one clear solution besides the immediate formation of an independent Classification Committee, and that is to make girls’ golf a three-division sport.

In short, increasing the number of divisions would solve the entirety of the complaints from both sides and would create real balance in the sport of girls’ golf as the current initiative clearly creates an imbalance.

Alone, the new initiative addresses one problem while creating another. However, an added division would turn a controversial idea into a no brainer. Here’s why.

The teams that perpetually underperformed in D1 and D2 would both move down, not up, thus leveling the playing field for everyone, not just the select few. Moreover, it wouldn’t unfairly punish small programs like Prescott across the state for the imbalanced way that private schools are able to source students for their athletic departments.

It should be noted that the current two division system is relatively new.

In 2003 there were 133 teams, but not all those teams were created equally. In the face of the competitive imbalance between the largest and smallest schools, they segmented off about 2/3 (87) of those teams into Division 1 and the remaining 1/3 (46) into Division 2.

In 2023, there were 173 teams: 104 in Division 1 and 69 in Division 2.

Following the model from 2003, if you reduced Division 1 back to 87 teams you would have 43 teams in D2 (almost the exact same as 2003) and 43 teams in D3 thus creating a competitive balance that works within the current initiative’s framework of being able to adjust teams up and down accordingly. It would also provide the ability to admit new schools who will join over the next 20 years into divisions that are appropriate for their skill and population levels.

In this scenario, Prescott would remain in D2. They would be joined by the lower end of D1 teams and the upper end of D2 teams – a perfect fit.

In the current system, Prescott moving up one division in a two-division sport is the equivalent of having their D4 football team move to D1; it just doesn’t make sense. It’s too big of a jump for school districts like Prescott, especially when their only recourse is to appeal to what can very easily be called a corrupt, or at least biased and deaf, panel of judges. That or to wait for three years, otherwise known as the entire tenure of the current players’ high school careers.

Enrollment for girls’ sports is at an all-time high, and the number of high school students statewide will only keep increasing over time, thus making adding a third division an eventual inevitability anyway. Adding a third division to work in unison with the current initiative is far less complicated than developing a new competitive balance idea to fix the obvious imbalances that it causes in its current form.

Whether this idea will gain traction remains to be seen. For now, Salay says they are ready to go for next year. They saw this as a likely possibility for them since the initiative began, and they’ve been dedicated to being the best team in the state bar none since last year.

“I really did assume that this was going to happen, so we conveyed that to the girls,” Salay said. “Even at our postseason meetings when we were setting their goals for next year, I essentially told them, ‘These goals are set to be a division one champion. We're expecting to go up, so this is where we need you next year.’”

Salay says regardless of what happens, the Cardinals are up to the challenge.

“Our goal is to be literally the best team in the state. So now we have a chance to prove that. To me, that's the positive,” Salay said. “Our whole team who competed at state is coming back, so we're in a good position to make the jump. The top teams that beat us at state last year in D1 all lost their number one and number two players, so they're going to be at a little bit of a disadvantage. That's why we’re already kind of projecting that we'll have a have a good shot.”

Like Ali versus Frazier, it's a once in a lifetime opportunity to have a team who has won the state championship so many times in a row in D2 go head-to-head with the biggest powerhouses in D1 for a chance to become the only team to ever win a title in both divisions, which would make them the unequivocal number one team in the state of Wisconsin.

“I want to put an emphasis to people in Prescott that we're asked to do something that no one else has done, at least in Prescott for sure,” Salay said. “We’re going to have to compete against literally the biggest schools and all the best teams state, and we've built this program to do that. We're excited to have that chance.”