Somthing
wrong with UIL mathematics?
By Casey
Doherty
Magis staff writer
The Jesuits
love challenges—St. Xavier in India, those dudes who
fought the Portuguese army in The Mission Strake Jesuit vs.
19-5A.
However, unlike Xavier and De Niro, Jesuit did not directly
choose to
face one of the toughest districts in Texas.
Here are some quick stats for you.
Jesuit has 836 boys right now. Katy Taylor has 2,635 students,
and thanks to Jesuit will no longer be the smallest school
in 19-5A.
Alief Taylor has 2,941 students, Katy 3,205, Cinco Ranch 3,239,
Mayde Creek 3,402, Hastings 3,947, and Elsik, thank God for
the
Texas Public Educational System, has 4,062 Rams roaming its
halls.
The UIL loves to point out that Jesuit’s size is misleading
because
it is all boys; therefore the size of the student body must
be doubled.
Oh, that makes everything better.
Double Jesuit’s 836 and you get 1,672 students. That
means on
average the difference between Jesuit and all the other schools
is
only 1,675 students.
Yep, on average all the other teams in 19-5A more than double
Jesuit.
Maybe the mathematicians at the UIL multiplied 836 by 2 one
too
many times on their calculators.
Another slightly more plausible explanation that could bail
the UIL
out of this statistical quagmire would be that Jesuit is just
too big
for 4A, so they have to be in 5A.
Many people assume this, after all the UIL is an agency of
the Texas Government, it must know what it's doing.
However, in the words of the great Lee Corso, I’d like
to say, “Not so
fast my friend.”
There are many schools in 4A who’s enrollment exceeds
the doubled enrollment of Jesuit, such as our 1,867 friends
at McKinney high school,
and our 1,912 newly admitted 4A comrades just up north at
Klein Oak.
So why would the UIL put Jesuit in a district which on average
doubles us?
Politics of course. The UIL never wanted Jesuit in the UIL.
I went to a “welcome” meeting with UIL officials
last year along with other Jesuit student athletes and haven’t
seen such forced smiles since Bush explained where the WMD
were in Iraq.
Jesuit didn’t make a clean, polite entrance into the
UIL. We came in
on the threat of a lawsuit. The UIL had to admit us, but no
specifications
were stipulated so the UIL put Jesuit in its toughest and
biggest district.
Jesuit could go the path of the Woodlands and expand our school
to behemoth size, but Jesuit has that nagging obsession with
preserving academic integrity.
So what’s a poor Catholic school to do?
For starters, Jesuit will definitely continue to play hard
and will succeed.
The Jesuit Cross Country team went to Regionals, and the soccer
team
is ranked #8 in the city in the 5A rankings. (Before this
year, Jesuit was always ranked in the 4A rankings.) Jesuit
will continue to be competitive
in 5A much to the chagrin of UIL officials, but it only seems
fair that we
be allowed to play and compete amongst schools that are our
size, rather than those that double it. |
