Clouds emerge as LHSAA approaches its centennial

What should have been a season of joy and celebration is a time for consternation. Not knowing what the coronavirus pandemic will bring on a day-to-day basis has LHSAA executive director Eddie Bonine making tentative plans for the start of the new school year after a disappointing ending to the LHSAA’s 99th sports calendar.
    

“This (virus) has affected 7,114 seniors,” he said while running his part of the association’s business from his home office. “On Friday, March 13, there were 77 (COVID) cases in three parishes. Thirty-three were confirmed and one person passed away. On April 13, there are 20,000 confirmed cases.”
 

Unprecedented interruption
    

The spring sports season was in progress when Bonine and the LHSAA executive committee, through a memo to the 404 member principals, canceled all gatherings until the tentative date of May 1. In the history of the LHSAA, no season had ever been ended before its conclusion, whether for war, weather events or teachers’ strikes.
    

The LHSAA’s decision was made necessary when Gov. John Bel Edwards ordered all Louisiana public schools to close through April 30. Catholic and private schools followed suit shortly afterwards. The final events for boys and girls in the sports of baseball, softball, tennis, golf and track and field took place on March 16.
 

Centennial plans cloudy
    

How the LHSAA proceeds with its plans for the 100th anniversary depends on how quickly the virus subsides to a safe level.
    

“Working with our budget today, the plan is to have a (centennial) banquet in October and invite past executive directors, executive committee members and former LHSAA staffs,” Bonine said. “We had to cancel our Hall of Fame inductions ceremony, so maybe we will hold the two events together. But during this lull, I have to cut some money out of our budget.”
    

This once-in-a-lifetime event is important to an association that has one of the nation’s richest sports traditions, and whose athletes have gone on to achieve hall of fame status in every major sport.
    

“For this association and the 100 years it has put in, the celebration is important,” Bonine noted. “When you look at the history – all the great athletes, coaches and programs – there is a lot to celebrate.”
    

Over the decades, Louisi­ana built a reputation for outstanding high school athletics. In 2000, Sports Illustrated ranked Louisiana and its rich pool of athletes sixth nationally.          
    

In 1972, women’s sports took on equal importance when Title IX was enacted as a follow-up to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By 1970, all Louisiana high schools became integrated, and former members of an all-African-American sports body –  the Louisiana Interscholastic Athletic and Literary Organi­zation – became LHSAA members.
    

Girls’ athletics have flourished since the mid-1960s, when the LHSAA began hosting a women’s basketball tournament, one of the first states to do so. And since 1981, the state championship football games have been played in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, which has become the LHSAA’s marquee event.
    

Life was much simpler and the future promising the year that the LHSAA was founded in 1920. The city had fully recovered from the deadly Spanish flu epidemic that claimed the lives of countless citizens two years earlier, and was undergoing urban growth and prosperity.
    

The fledgling Louisiana High School Athletic Association would separate its members into two separate classes based on each school’s enrollment. There were no sports in which girls would participate. The annual membership fee was $2.
    

Principals who joined the new LHSAA were emphatic that the new league would consist of public schools only. That practice ended in 1929 when the association allowed certified private and parochial secondary institutions the opportunity to join.
    

That was nearly a century ago. Since then, the LHSAA has grown to now include 405 schools, and services more than 90,000 athletes who participate in 27 championship sports (14 for boys and 13 for girls). A celebration to commemorate all who have written the story of Louisiana high school sports would be an important reminder of this great legacy. It would be abhorrent to let this opportunity pass by.