Interleague showdowns always prove to be exciting. In Major League baseball (MLB), when the American League’s New York Yankees face the National League’s New York Mets the entire city takes notice.
These mid-season interleague matchups can prove to be as exciting as any postseason game. Even though the season isn’t on the line, bragging rights are.
Similar to MLB, New York City high school athletics are divided into two leagues, the Public School Athletic League (PSAL) and the Catholic High School Athletic Association (CHSAA). Matchups between the two leagues occur in almost every sport. Both the city and public organizations such as Big Apple Basketball organize these events.
PSAL, founded in 1903, encompasses the athletic program of every New York City public high school, serving a total of 212 schools. Most sports are organized to pit teams of similar strength and location against each other.
CHSAA, established in 1927, houses the athletic programs of New York City’s Catholic and parochial high schools. But unlike PSAL, CHSAA also admits schools from beyond the greater New York City area such as Westchester and Nassau and Suffolk counties. Despite covering a greater area, CHSAA serves only 37 schools.
CHSAA’s size doesn’t hinder competition with the larger PSAL. Past matchups have yielded mixed results, with league supremacy varying by sport. Each league has legitimate reasons to claim it is the better league although the quality of play in each league varies by sport.
Even though both leagues’ football programs allow one non-league game per season, the city’s top schools generally do not face off in interleague play. Brooklyn Technical High School (PSAL) and Xaverian High School (CHSAA) both attend the Camp Equinunk football training camp.
“It was a little subconscious competition between schools,” said sophomore Daniel Jacala, a member of Brooklyn Tech’s varsity football team. The two teams scrimmaged on the last day of camp.
Some assume that PSAL football teams refrain from interleague play out of fear of losing. “We would have a chance of beating them,” Stuyvesant sophomore and captain of the junior varsity (JV) football Peglegs Ari Fima said.
Interleague scrimmages can be useful for a team. Earlier this year, the Stuyvesant Hitmen, the junior varsity baseball team, scrimmaged against Xavier’s JV team. Fima is also a member of the JV Hitmen. He said the scrimmage exposed the team’s weaknesses. “We didn’t practice enough, we walked too many hitters,” Fima said.
Non-scrimmage competition has also fueled the PSAL-CHSAA rivalry. On Saturday, September 8, 2007 some of the top PSAL and CHSAA teams faced off in the PSAL-CHSAA soccer challenge. The 2006 champions of both the PSAL and CHSAA, Martin Luther King and St. Francis Prep High Schools, respectively, participated. PSAL won two games, CHSAA won only one and one game ended in a tie.
PSAL and CHSAA are also stacked up against each other in published poll rankings. Teams from both leagues also made the National Soccer Coaches of Association of America (NSCAA) national and state rankings.
Martin Luther King, the PSAL’s top team, finished the season ranked number four in the country. CHSAA’s top team, Chaminade, ranked 13th in the country after spending a few weeks as the top team in the nation. Martin Luther King and Chaminade are first and second, respectively, in the NSCAA New York State rankings.
Other rankings offer a different take on the two leagues. The New York State Sports Writers’ Association’s (NYSSWA) weekly boys’ cross-country polls clearly show CHSAA as the superior league. The polls which are updated weekly rank the top twenty-five teams in the state. Chaminade and Kellenberg Memorial High School, the two top finishers in the CHSAA championship, appeared in every week of the rankings.
At one point, both were ranked as one of the top five schools in the state. Four other CHSAA schools made appearances in the NYSSWA rankings. The only PSAL team to appear in the rankings was Stuyvesant, this year’s PSAL city champions. Stuyvesant fell out of the rankings after one week.
CHSAA had built a reputation for having a superior basketball league. This was put to the test in 2004, when Big Apple Basketball (BAB) created the Big Apple Basketball Challenge. BAB is a not-for-profit organization that “hosts basketball tournaments, conducts clinics, offers college scholarship programs, mentoring programs and manages touring teams,” according to BAB’s website.
The Challenge is a series of games between the top PSAL and CHSAA basketball leagues. “Going into this I thought the Catholic league was probably a little strong,” Director of Operations at Big Apple Basketball Jason Curry said. The Big Apple Basketball Challenge has been occurring annually since its creation.
After four years of direct competition, the record of the challenge is 26-12 in favor of the CHSAA. The CHSAA won the 2004, 2006 and 2007 challenges with records of 7-3, 8-1 and 5-3 respectively. The PSAL edged the CHSAA in 2006 with a 6-5 record.
Even though the records reinforce the idea of CHSAA dominance, the games show otherwise.
“Six games the Catholic League schools have won were by three points or less, so it could have easily been a .500 record,” said Curry. Closely fought games, not CHSAA dominance, have been the challenge’s theme.
The 2007 challenge featured 16 of the top New York City boys’ Catholic and public high school teams. The first day of this year’s challenge, held at Baruch College on December 8, was capped off by a double overtime battle between Holy Cross and Boys and Girls. Holy Cross won the game with a score of 78-73.
While events like the Big Apple Challenge have given city high schools opportunities for interleague competition, it is hard to determine which league is better. Comparing both PSAL and CHSAA cannot be determined solely by the competition between the two leagues, even though they serve as good indicators of how well schools in each league are performing.
Moreover, determining the better league depends more on the structure of their organization and how each solves existing problems.
In Part II of this in-depth look into the PSAL and CHSAA, The Spectator will examine the structure and functions of both organizations and how they compare with each other.