School Characteristics and Interscholastic Tournament Success

Interscholastic sports are part of the educational mission of the schools. However, parents, athletes, and others seem to emphasize winning, causing success (or, at least, the possibility of success) to be the target of state policies to promote competitive balance, following from an egalitarian approach to the theory of distributive justice. For example, most states have divided schools into separate class tournaments based on school enrollment. Many have also attempted to counteract perceived advantages held by private (non-boundary) schools by using multipliers to artificially increase private schools’ enrollment. Some states compensate for poorer schools’ perceived disadvantages by artificially decreasing enrollment for those schools with a high percentage of the student body eligible for the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). To enact effective policies, however, it is helpful to know what school characteristics are linked with winning. This project is a case study examining high school boys’ basketball in Indiana with a basic research question of what school characteristics influence tournament success. The literature and many current state policies propose that being private, larger, urban, wealthier, and from certain regions of the state might all improve tournament success. Each is examined for its effects on winning a state championship and on a more-expansive measure of success based on how far in the tournament a team progresses using data collected for all entrants in the Indiana boys’ basketball tournament over a 26-year period. The relative size of the student body seems to be the most consistently important factor in tournament success across classes. Being a private school or being an urban school are only factors in success for the classes of smaller schools. The region of the state is not shown to be significant to success. Of particular note, though there has been an increase in state policies targeting an imbalance caused by economic factors, there has not yet been an empirical finding of a link between these economic factors and success. This study does find limited evidence of such a link as schools with a lower percentage of students eligible for NSLP are more successful in the tournament. These results can help refine the knowledge of what does and does not affect tournament success and can guide policy changes aimed at improving competitive balance.