Why do high school sports in Rhode Island exist today?
To win championships? To groom athletes for college scholarships? To build rivalries? To produce All-Staters and Gatorade Players of the Year? To continue Thanksgiving football traditions?
Or do high school sports still exist to give kids a reason to attend school? To provide them an opportunity to be on a team? To teach them skills they will use to become solid, productive citizens? To prepare them for the next step in life?
Mike Lunney has pondered those questions as students settle in for another academic year. He is executive director of the Rhode Island Interscholastic League, the governing body for high school sports in the state. The RIIL was founded in 1899, has 73 members, and oversees 21 sports with 33,510 participants last year.
And he worries that we are forgetting why high school sports started in the first place.
“There are a few things on my mind, obviously,” Lunney told me during a wide-ranging conversation we had recently. A few? Read on.
PARTICIPATION
“You know, I’m listening to [Angelica Infante-Green, Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education] talking about attendance matters and putting an emphasis on those types of things at the school level, and it occurred to me that this is exactly why school-based sports and extracurricular activities were created in the first place,” Lunney said. “To keep kids engaged with school. To keep them coming to school. To give them a reason to come to school, representing their school in a positive way. It got me thinking about participation.”
He addressed participation at a meeting of coaches and administrators last month at Rhode Island College.
“The pursuit of winning is absolutely important. As long as we’re keeping score, that’s an important thing. But if that’s the purpose of what we’re doing in a school-based environment, then we’re doing something wrong,’’ the former basketball coach and athletics director at Portsmouth High School told them.
“Let’s not forget about development. Let’s not forget about the kid who may not help us get where we want to go. They need us maybe more than we need them to put a winning program together. There are countless examples of those kids out there,” he added.
Lunney is concerned that participation in high-school sports here is declining. The National Federation of High Schools reported record participation last year, but participation in Rhode Island has been flat or slightly down.
“Some of our sub-varsity programs are dwindling. Last year in girls basketball we had half as many girls playing basketball as boys. JV programs, even at the Division 1 level, are starting to dwindle. The question is, why?”
He offered a few reasons.
“We’ve had so much turnover of principals, athletic directors, coaches that are not educators coming into our space. The proliferation of youth sports and how they have just become a different animal. So what concerns me there is that mentality bleeding into school-based sport,” he said.
“We’re trying to put an emphasis back on why school sports were created to begin with. We’re looking into those things, but the point is to me if we’re focusing too much on quality in our world, then I think something is wrong. Participation has got to be our focus. . . . There’s a place for every kid in our program.”
CO-OPS
Advocates for co-ops — teams comprising athletes from multiple schools — have argued for years that they provide participation opportunities for kids at schools that lack sufficient numbers for a stand-alone team. Lunney wonders if that approach has become too loose. Last winter, athletes from eight schools — Burrillville, Ponaganset, Bay View, North Smithfield, Cumberland, Lincoln, St. Raphael and Woonsocket — skated for the Northern Rhode Island Co-op, nicknamed Yeti.
La Salle was the only school to sponsor its own team in the seven-team girls ice hockey league, which raises an interesting question. Should schools drop programs that do not generate sufficient interest?
“Are schools doing self-evaluation of their programs and offering sports and activities that kids are really interested in?” Lunney asked. Dropping a sport is easier said than done.
“Once you have something, to take it away in this day and age is hard. In the old days if kids came in and said we want to start this team, the answer would be no because we don’t have enough kids. Now, because we’ve tried to create as many participation opportunities as we can, co-ops become the way to keep those programs going,” he said.
“To me, the best co-ops work when a couple of schools that are never going to have enough kids to run a program come together to give kids a participation opportunity.”
Lunney is wary of the size of co-ops and when winning is the goal. Ice hockey, he acknowledges, is a different animal, especially for girls. Last winter, the Yeti comprised players from eight schools.
“What we’ve heard over time is the co-ops are a way to grow the game of hockey, and I don’t think that’s the case. Even on the boys side, we’re seeing the same thing in the sport. You’re not seeing those house leagues anymore that are feeding [schools]. If you’re not in that travel elite world, you’re pretty much not playing any more. I think that’s another reason there are fewer kids participating, fewer kids coming out for the teams, which is feeding into the whole concept of ‘Let’s co-op.’”
Regionalizing hockey, as some have suggested, is not the answer. “That’s not school sports. If one region has a lot of kids, that’s going to take away opportunities. That’s one of the things we’re concerned about,” Lunney said.
FLAG FOOTBALL
Mark your calendars. Girls flag football is coming to the Interscholastic League in the spring of 2027. The Principals Committee on Athletics has approved a flag football sport committee consisting of athletics directors and administrators. Committee members are researching formats — 5 versus 5, 7 v. 7 — the size of the field, kicking, which means goal posts, and scheduling. They will report their findings at the November PCOA meeting.
ADs are concerned that adding flag football may dilute existing programs, but national statistics do not support that concern.
“Stats are showing that flag football in the states that have sanctioned it is bringing in new kids, not taking away from programs that are already there. If that’s true, then obviously we want to support that,” Lunney said.
Eighteen states sanction flag football for girls. The NFL supports the sport with its Flag 50 program. Nike is behind the movement. It is on the schedule for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. The Patriots have reached out to Rhode Island, Lunney said.
Flag is happening at the youth level, and interest is percolating up. Boys are playing. Troy Vincent, the NFL’s executive vice president for football operations, has called flag “the future of the game of football,” Mary Pilon wrote in the Sept. 7 editions of the New York Times. Lunney predicts that flag will be popular among inner-city girls who do not play a sport now.
THE CURRENT LANDSCAPE
Lunney and I also discussed mental health, leadership, eligibility and transfer rules, the impact of private schools and club programs, and specialization. He reminded me that the RIIL is a membership organization and that change rises up from the membership; it does not trickle down from the top. The same is true across the country. State associations are trying to educate the public because, he said, “there’s a lot of misperception out there.”
“We’re sandwiched. Everything below us is kind of geared toward winning and specialization. Everything above us is about money, even at the college level. We’re kind of that last group trying to provide opportunities for kids to be connected to the school. That’s our main goal, he said.
But we always circled back to participation.
“To me, let’s get back to what this was all created for. We’re not trying to get kids to the next level athletically, although we’ve had countless numbers of kids that have done it, but a really small percentage overall. That’s not our goal. We’re trying to get them prepared to be good citizens, to get to the next level of life. But do we really believe that? Do we really practice that? For us it’s always about trying to influence behavior in a positive direction. So we want to talk about it.”
