Stephen Gainey (Courtesy photo)
A rise in ejections across sports in the North Carolina High School Athletic Association has raised the concern of Stephen Gainey.
Gainey, the superintendent of the Randolph County School System, is serving as NCHSAA president.
“I’m seeing sportsmanship issues,” Gainey said last week after the association’s spring meetings wrapped up. “I see it on the field. I see it in the stands. And it’s very concerning to me.”
The number of ejections of players has increased dramatically during the 2024-25 school year, NCHSAA commissioner Que Tucker said.
For Gainey, who regularly attends sports competitions in Randolph County and at the state level in the postseason, there needs to be adjustments in behavior. In some ways, it stems from cultures within the programs.
“I’m just going to tell you, we have a problem,” Gainey said. “We need to get it turned the other way. … What bothers me is we’re having this interfere with all the positives of high school athletics.”
Gainey said it’s possible to have less-confrontational environments for athletics. There have been more than 1,000 ejections this school year.
“We need to look and see if we can strengthen those consequences a little bit,” Gainey said. “If you look at our ejections, they just continue to rise from year to year. I have schools of my own that I get concerned about. I watch things going on there in the stands and on the court.”
Prior to the State Board of Education overseeing certain rules and structure, Tucker said NCHSAA penalties were stiffer, mandating a two-game suspension.
“Not that we want students to have more penalties,” she said, but deterrents to misbehavior generally result in fewer problems.
Fill out a bracket
Regarding postseasons and bracketing, Ratings Percentage Index will be used exclusively to seed teams. The best seeds will no longer be reserved for conference champions. In fact, conference regular-season and tournament champions won’t even been guaranteed spots in the postseason.
The RPI is a combination of a team’s winning percentage (40 percent), its opponents winning percentage (40 percent) and its opponents’ opponents winning percentage (20 percent).
Protecting conference champions would have been more problematic because of the expanded number of classifications. Many conferences have teams from multiple classifications.
Some schools have never been in a split conference, Gainey said. Now, there will be conferences with schools representing up to three classifications.
“This eight-class system was a result of a vote of membership,” he said. “We have to have some time to see how all this is going to work out.”
All together or not
From some sources there’s a push to create separate championships within the NCHSAA for parochial and charter schools, so traditional public schools don’t have to compete against them.
“The board and staff needs time,” Gainey said. “That has a lot of implications.”
Gainey said addressing this topic would take careful study, particularly in the aftermath of the months-long restructuring connected with the shift from four classifications to eight.
Of the NCHSAA’s 442 member schools, about 60 would fall into the category of parochial and charter schools – with that percentage increasing. One of those familiar to Gainey is Uwharrie Charter Academy, which has captured multiple state championships. That Randolph County school isn’t part of the RCSS, but it sits in the district’s footprint.
Gainey said while pleas to separate certain schools during postseasons have been received, there are other stakeholders who the NCHSAA hasn’t heard from on the topic.
“Charter schools are part of our membership and they have been,” he said. “We have charter schools that are very active members in our membership and we’ve made that work.”
Monumental changes for NCHSAA schools have been in the works. Those are about to be implemented for the 2025-26 school year.
Tucker praised Gainey for his leadership during “an historic year.”
Gainey said there has been plenty going on.
“It has been an exciting year for me,” he said.
