Could it be another Easter miracle?  While the original Easter miracle won’t ever be surpassed and has had a much greater impact on humanity, this one may ring loudly in the world of Texas high school athletics—if it actually comes to pass.

If Houston’s Strake Jesuit and Dallas Jesuit win their respective soccer matches on Thursday, the UIL will see something it has never seen—and may not see again for some time: an all-private school state championship match in the ‘public school’ league of the state.  

How did Dallas Jesuit and Strake become member schools of the UIL?  

Beginning with the 2003-2004 school year, Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas and Strake Jesuit College Preparatory of Houston, were granted UIL membership. This came after extensive court battles and negotiations from both the UIL’s lawyers and the schools’ joint lawyers.  Previously, both schools were members of the now-defunct Texas Christian Interscholastic League (TCIL)

After that league’s demise and their inability to gain admittance into the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools (TAPPS) or Southwest Preparatory Conference (SPC), Dallas Jesuit and Strake Jesuit decided to further pursue their decade-long battle of gaining membership into the UIL.

The UIL won the case in federal court, but while it was on appeal to the Fifth Circuit, the parties settled.  Part of the settlement was to carve out a small exception to the general rule that, in effect, works to keep private schools out of the UIL. The exception allows into Class 5A those private schools that are not eligible for membership in a similar league, provided they have also never been suspended or kicked out of a similar private league.

The two Jesuit schools met the criteria. They had gotten so big that they were not eligible for TAPPS. They had never had their membership suspended or revoked. So the UIL allowed them in—at the 5A level.

(Cornerstone Christian School of San Antonio, a former TAPPS member who was refused re-entry after excessive recruiting violations, recently attempted to gain entry to the UIL, claiming eligibility on the basis that they were ineligible to join TAPPS as that organization refused to accept them as a member. That case was later dismissed.)

So, how would the UIL and its directors feel about having the two private schools competing for a state championship?  In all honesty, they likely wouldn’t be thrilled by it, but enough water has passed under the bridge since the schools’ entry that they wouldn’t be terribly upset by it either.

The Strake Jesuit basketball team represented Region III in the state basketball tournament last year and, from all appearances, weren’t treated by tournament officials any differently than any other team in any classification.  The Crusaders, led by future NCAA performers Joey Brooks (Notre Dame) and Tim Frazier (Penn State), lost to eventual  state champ De Soto in the semifinal. 

While a couple of in-game officiating calls were questionable, there was no hint that the team was playing against a stacked deck.

Fans from schools that have been knocked out of the playoffs by the Rangers and Crusaders are a completely different story, though.  Once again, in conversations and on message boards, questions about the Jesuit schools’ right to inclusion in the UIL have arisen.  And the bitterness flows.

Questions about attendance zones (or lack thereof) and scholarship offerings occupy most of the rhetoric.  The ‘critics’ believe the schools have an unfair advantage that helps them dominate the realm of athletics.

Here’s the problem that I see with that argument:  neither school has yet to make any kind of solid run at a state championship in football. 

In Texas, if you are going to use an unfair advantage in a high school sport, you’re going to use it in football.  If you can offer scholarships to the best players to entice them to play for your team, you’re going to offer them to quarterbacks, running backs, left tackles and middle linebackers. 

While Strake and Dallas Jesuit both have proven to be very competitive in football, they haven’t been able to attract players to the schools that would put them on par with Katy, Euless Trinity or Southlake Carroll.

Until they do, I’m going to ignore the sour grapes in soccer and treat this as what it probably is: the Lord working in mysterious ways again.