So...the new MSHSAA quizbowl districts have been released, now featuring maps by Bing. It's actually kind of interesting to look at the geographic distribution of teams in different classes. For instance, class 1 teams are very densely packed into the northwest corner of the state. This isn't something I ever realized before. Class 2 and 3 seem a little more normally distributed, with Class 4 obviously being fairly exclusive to the opposite ends of I-70.

Discuss. I'm interested more in the geographic distribution than the actual assignment of teams into districts, but feel free to discuss either.

I am still confused as to why SLUH and Priory are in a completely different district than the rest of the private Catholic schools, and Ladue is in our district.

A combination of geography and number of students... regardless of your opinion on MSHSAA's involvement in quiz bowl, they do make fairly good map distributions for districts (it's about as close as it can get, given how teams of various sizes are distributed across the state).

Priory isn't even in Class 4, so its location doesn't factor into the Class 4 splits. If you look closely at the map, putting SLUH into the same district as Villa makes no sense, geographically speaking, as the schools in Villa's district are all very, very close to one another, while SLUH is much further east.

That totally explains why Kirksville and the Blue Springs schools were in a district together for years.

I said fairly good, not perfect... the distribution they have in Class 4 now is about as good as it's going to be for Kirksville's anomalous location cf. its size.

That was the point I was going to make. There's not another 4A school anywhere near Kirksville; I think Hannibal would be the closest. Rolla HS has the same problem; there's no other 4A school anywhere near it (Salem, St. James and Cuba are all 3A). They always wind up in the same 4A district with Lebanon (60 miles southeast) and Smith-Cotton in Sedalia (which is a lot farther than that).

As Alex noted, public vs. private makes no difference except for the enrollment multiplier that MSHSAA slaps on the private schools. We've discussed this before re: quiz bowl assignments, but nothing ever came of it.

MSHSAA don't budge much from population and proximity, even in football. They wouldn't even gerrymander the districts & class sizes to allow Brookfield & Marceline to stay in the same class seven years ago, and that nearly killed the historic Bell Game.

One thing that MSHSAA really hoses private schools on is the single-gender doubler. In spite of Academic Competition being a co-ed event, they still double the populations of single-gender schools. Some of those private schools should be in a lower class because of that, or otherwise one brain at St. Louis Priory remains the same as 2.7 brains at Parkway Central.

A couple of quizbowl schools are really hit hard by that, especially Villa Duchesne. I've always thought it patently unfair that Villa Duchesne has only 330-ish students, but they get counted as having over 800.

And they've yet to fix it because 1) it'll only affect academic competition and music contests, 2) since there's really no competition in music contest, all it'd do would be to make the kids play different music selections if they switch classes, and 3) no one affected has complained to MSHSAA, to my knowledge.

Of course, we are talking about a sub-par format and an organization run like Animal Farm.