Why not try a different approach to classes?

When it comes down to it, all we're really looking at is a bunch of numbers.

When the Kansas State High School Activities Association decides each year what classes each one of its 300-plus schools will be assigned to, it just looks at numbers. How many students were in the school building that day? That's all. There's no consideration to whether the school is rural or urban, nor if the school has a greater percentage of boys than girls or vice versa.

If numbers were the be all and end all, it would be universally accepted that Hays and Fort Scott and Frontenac are exactly the same kind of school and should be grouped together and that's the end of that.

However, a disagreement -- whatever form it may have taken -- formed among the lower-populated schools in Class 4A. They figured that no, Frontenac and Girard and Goodland are not the same kind of schools as Hays, Fort Scott and Andover Central.

They proposed solutions. One was rejected. The other brings us the split of Class 4A into two divisions in certain sports. The effect so far is that Fort Scott has been thrown into a very tough volleyball Sub-State and a new football district for 2014 and 2015 in which there's a great chance that one of three good football programs will not make the playoffs each season. That's not even considering the possibility that Labette County makes a huge turnaround next season.

But this is what the KSHSAA gives you because it considers only raw data. You end up with classes full of schools that are not alike. And you end up with playoff groupings strictly based on geography and not on the relative strength of schools.

There's been an attempt to balance things out. Classes 6A and 5A try to balance playoff brackets, but there's still an east-west split. All of the soccer classes try to balance things out, but you end up with state quarterfinals which don't make a lot of sense.

The KSHSAA seems to want things to be tidy. Classes should be divisible by 8 as much as possible, so they have to have either 32 or 64 schools (Except 1A, since it made up of all the remaining schools and 100 isn't divisible by 8). Then it should be able to divide each of those classes by either 4 or 8 to get nice, tidy playoff brackets.

As long as the KSHSAA wants things to be nice and tidy, not much will satisfy everybody. So I've thought about this for a while, and my conclusion is that it's time for the current 32-32-64-64-64-and-the-rest class structure to be retired.

In it's place, I propose a system based on a population range for each of the six classes and each one would get the number of schools that fits within that range.

For example, Class 6A would have every school in Kansas with 1,000 or more students. Based on last year's numbers, Class 6A would have had the 46 largest schools in Kansas.

Class 5A would have every school between 600 and 999 students. Last year, Class 5A would have had only 29 schools. So be it. At least those 29 are more alike.

Class 4A would have every school between 300 and 599 students. Fort Scott would have been the eighth-largest of 40 schools in this class.

Class 3A would have had 80 schools but if 1A can deal with having almost 100, then 80 shouldn't be any more difficult to work with.

But I think you get the idea. Why not group the schools into classes where they're as much alike as possible? Big city schools together, suburban schools together, rural schools together.

Or does that make too much sense?