LITTLE ROCK — An incomprehensible breakdown in communication triggered Van Buren’s lawsuit against the Arkansas Activities Association, the school’s athletic director said Thursday afternoon.
“Somebody dropped the ball on it,” Randy Loyd said. “I think the communication part of it was not good for everybody involved.”
Van Buren, which filed the lawsuit last Friday in Crawford County Circuit Court, is seeking immediate injunctive relief from its conference assignment and a convoluted playoff power rating system that AAA-member schools in the state’s two largest classifications (16 in Class 7A and 16 in Class 6A) are using in the 2010-2012 cycle.
Loyd said he doesn’t know when the case will be heard, but the legal fight comes as football teams are only two weeks away from the start of the postseason.
Van Buren is 6-2 overall and 3-2 in the 7A /6ACentral Conference entering tonight’s home game with Cabot.
“I can promise you the timing of this, coming down before the playoffs, had nothing to do with it,” Loyd said. “We’re going to make the playoffs. We’re going to be [a 1-6 seed] somewhere,so it’s not a deal where we’re trying to wait until the very end to make this thing a mess.”
Loyd said Van Buren Superintendent Merle Dickerson began discussing legal action shortly after finding out in late September that the school’s football team wouldn’t be credited with 35 power rating points used to seed teams for the postseason in two conferences.
Lag time of approximately a month before filing the lawsuit was necessary, Loyd said, for Dickerson to receive community feedback , research the issue and meet with school attorneys.
“When that happened,” Loyd said of the lost power rating points, “we decided to throw the 6A/7A classification thing on it and try to get both things at one time.”
Van Buren, traditionally one of the smallest Class 7A schools, and Russellville dropped to Class 6A for the 2010-2012 cycle, but they were placed in the new 7A/6A-Central with six Class 7A schools.
Meanwhile, Class 7A Little Rock Hall and West Memphis are competing with six Class 6A schools in the new 7A/6A-East.
Following the regular season, the four schools are scheduled to trade places for postseason certification and be ranked through a power rating for conference finish.
Officials at Van Buren and Russellville said in late September that they believed all games would count toward accumulating points for a power rating.
Instead, 6A schools had voted 13-0 in January to change the original formula and only count conference games toward the power rating.
It only needed a simple majority of the 16 schools to pass.
Little Rock School District Athletic Director Johnny Johnson said schools voted to tweak the system so it would mirror the power rating formula used in 7A.
Teams with the six highest power ratings in each conference - 7A/6ACentral and 7A/6A-East - will advance to the playoffs.
Van Buren has 44 power rating points to rank fourth among 6A-East schools. But the additional 35 points could mean the difference between a No. 1 playoff seed, a first-round bye and home field advantage throughout the postseason.
The 7A-West (all 7A schools) and 6A-South (all 6A schools) will continue to use traditional won-loss records to certify their top six playoff seeds.
Power ratings were created to address equity in the seeding process.
Van Buren had 35 power rating points under the formula for all games, including 10 points for nonconference victories over Class 5A Alma, Class 7A Rogers and Class 5A Harrison.
Van Buren also received one point for each victory by Alma and Harrison (a total of four at that time) and a bonus point for playing a Class7A opponent, Rogers.
But Van Buren and Russellville unexpectedly found themselves starting from scratch when conference play began Sept. 24.
Loyd said Van Buren knew nothing of the voting addendum. Russellville football Coach Jeff Holt said he was in the dark, too.
Documents provided by the AAA to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in late May - roughly four months after the vote - stated that the Class 6A power rating would be based on “conference and nonconference games.”
“We didn’t know of anything that had happened up until, like, our second or third week of the season,” said Loyd, who also serves as the boys basketball coach at Van Buren.
Because of pending litigation, AAA Executive Director Lance Taylor said he couldn’t comment specifically on the case. But Taylor said the AAA is essentially a service organization and administers rules and regulations agreed upon by member schools.
“We let the schools decide on their issues,” Taylor said. “It’s not mandated from this office, and it’s not mandated from this board. Of course, when you’re only dealing with 16 and 16 [schools], they pretty much dictate how they want to do things. It’s pretty easy for 16 of them to come to some kind of consensus. The only thing they ask us to do is send out a ballot for a vote.”
Disconnect between Van Buren and the AAA, in this case, began brewing in the fall of 2008 when the state’s largest 32 schools in enrollment, citing concerns over travel, rising fuel prices and lost class time for students, voted for geographical conferencing during the 2010-2012 cycle.
The 32 schools formed four, eight team conferences during the regular season, but they would split for the postseason and compete in a “big school/small school” format.
The largest 16 schools in enrollment would compete for Class 7A state championships. The remaining 16 schools, including Van Buren, would compete for Class 6A state championships.
The AAA released conference assignments for this cycle in June 2009, but Class 6A Searcy won an appeal last fall - a 23-9 vote by Class 7A and 6A schools - to move six schools to different conferences.
The shuffling meant Van Buren and Russellville were the only 6A schools in what is now the 7A/6ACentral.
A subsequent 11th-hour push by Van Buren to have it and Russellville bite the travel bullet and play against exclusively 6A schools in the East, like Marion and Jonesboro, failed.
“I think everybody involved - I’m talking athletic directors, superintendents and AAA - I think they all understand where we were coming from on that deal,” Loyd said. “I don’t think anybody thinks it’s fair that a 6A team ought to be playing in a 7A conference.
“Like I told an AD yesterday: Until you walked in our shoes and been in the 7A for as long as we have and been that 16th team that’s playing these guys every Friday night and finally get an opportunity to drop to 6A, but yet you’re still playing 7A teams on Friday night to get to the 6A playoffs, there’s nothing fair about that.”
Sports, Pages 21 on 10/29/2010