“It was put in as a two-year plan with evaluation after that,” Dr. Charles Breithaupt, the UIL athletic director, said Monday during the league’s annual session with the media at the Texas High School Coaches Association convention. “Many of our school administrators are telling us that they feel like the program will have run its course when the second year is finished. They feel like the money could be much better spent in other ways.
“So we see it as about halfway done. We have another year to go.”
After the state legislature in the spring of 2007 mandated high school steroid testing, the UIL spent $1.3 to randomly test 10,117 athletes during the past school year, beginning in February. The urine samples collected yielded two positive results - a percentage of .0002.
There are those in the legislature who say that the testing served as a deterrent, and there are others around the state who say that there never was a steroid problem to begin with.
Research done by Texas A&M within the last five years had steroids 13th on a list of most-used drugs by high school students - behind crack and cocaine.
“It’s very difficult to determine if the testing served as a deterrent or not, because we had never measured possible steroid usage statistically before,” Breithaupt said. “So we have no way of knowing. We are pleased there were only two positive results.”
The first year of the program tested 6,455 boys in 12 sports, 3,662 girls (including 17 female football players) in 12 sports and 195 schools, numbers that will seem small-scale compared to the upcoming school year when approximately 35,000 students from 600 schools will be tested.
Split-classifications plan
not received well, UIL says
Apparently the UIL’s study of possible split classifications for football wasn’t met with much enthusiasm by coaches around the state.
The study showed a plan that would split each class into two divisions by enrollment, with districts comprised of schools of similar size. There would still be 12 football state champions crowned, but teams would be divided by enrollment for district play rather than just the postseason, as it is now.
“The initial response hasn’t been overwhelmingly favorable,” Breithaupt said. “The plan was looked at as a way to create more equity, but with that comes more travel. But the real reason I think it wasn’t received well was because once coaches saw who they were grouped with, they thought, ‘I don’t want to play them in district, or them in bi-district.’”
