When the Playing Field Isn’t Level: A Hard Truth About Charter Schools

The Case for Separate Divisions: Why Charter Schools Don’t Belong in the Same Playing Field

High school sports are supposed to be fair. Not perfect — but fair. They’re built on community, development, and opportunity. The kid from a small town should have the same chance to compete for a championship as anyone else wearing a school logo. That principle is the foundation of the NCHSAA.

Right now, that foundation is cracked.

This isn’t an attack on charter schools, their coaches, or their athletes. They’re playing by the rules in front of them. The issue isn’t effort, coaching, or culture. The issue is structure — and pretending that charter schools and traditional public schools operate under the same conditions is no longer realistic.

Charter schools are not bound by geographic attendance zones. Traditional public schools are. That single difference changes everything.

A public school pulls athletes from its immediate community — the same neighborhoods, the same middle schools, the same population year after year. A charter school can pull from an entire county, multiple counties, or wherever families are willing to drive. That creates a completely different talent pool, especially in lower classifications.

When those two models are placed in the same classification — especially 1A and 2A — the result is predictable. One side is building organically. The other is consolidating talent.

That’s not competitive balance. That’s structural imbalance.

Classification is supposed to group schools by comparable opportunity, not just enrollment numbers. But enrollment alone doesn’t tell the full story anymore. A charter with fewer students can still field deeper, bigger, faster, and more experienced teams than a small-town public school that barely has enough athletes to run a full practice.

And when that happens, it doesn’t just affect championships. It affects participation. It affects morale. It affects whether kids stick with programs that are already fighting uphill battles.

For the regular athlete at a small public school, being placed in the same bracket as a super team built from a massive geographic pool isn’t motivating — it’s demoralizing. You’re not measuring yourself against peers. You’re being asked to survive.

At that point, the comparison stops being fair. Having 1A basketball schools with six players over 6’5 playing against a school who might have a 6’5 player once every 10 years is extreme. It’s like asking an NCAA team to play an NBA roster for a national title and calling it competitive because both teams are technically playing basketball. The sport may be the same, but the circumstances aren’t even close.

This isn’t just a basketball problem. It is happening in every sport. Volleyball, Tennis, Football, Baseball, Basketball and more.

Some will argue that success should be rewarded and that winning programs should simply “play up.” That’s exactly the point. If charter schools are going to remain in the NCHSAA structure, they should be competing at the highest classification — not the lowest. If a program consistently looks like it belongs at the top, then it should be there permanently, not temporarily.

Better yet, charter schools should have their own division.

That doesn’t diminish what they do. It legitimizes it.

A separate division would allow charter programs to compete against schools built under the same enrollment freedoms and structural advantages. Championships would mean more. Rivalries would be real. And public schools — especially those in rural areas — would no longer feel like they’re being asked to climb a mountain just to reach the starting line.

This conversation isn’t about jealousy. It’s not about punishing success. It’s about protecting the purpose of high school athletics.

When championship paths become predictable before a season starts, something is broken. When entire classifications feel closed off to certain types of schools, something is broken. When kids start believing they have to leave their home school to experience winning, something is broken.

The NCHSAA has already acknowledged that balance matters by expanding classifications and adjusting alignment models. That’s a step — but it doesn’t go far enough.

Either charter schools need to compete in their own division, or they need to live at the top classification where advantages are minimized by scale. What cannot continue is pretending that schools built under fundamentally different rules should be competing for the same trophies at the same levels.

High school sports work best when opportunity feels real for everyone involved.

Right now, it doesn’t.

And until that changes, the regular athlete from a small town will keep paying the price — not because they aren’t good enough, but because the system wasn’t designed for them to win.

And if there’s still any doubt that this imbalance is real, the numbers tell the story.

Look at the 2025–26 fall Wells Fargo Conference and State Cup standings. The top three schools in 1A, 2A, and 3A are all charter schools. Even in 4A, the number one-ranked school is a charter.

That’s not coincidence. That’s not a one-year anomaly. That’s structural advantage playing out in real time.

When the same type of schools consistently sit at the top across multiple classifications, it reinforces the reality that they are not operating under the same constraints as traditional public schools. Competitive balance isn’t slipping — it’s already gone.

At some point, the NCHSAA has to stop asking small-town public schools to compete uphill and start building classifications that actually reflect how schools are allowed to operate.