A rule will soon make a Bloomington-Normal lacrosse team ineligible for postseason play.
Normal Community, Normal West and Bloomington High School play in a co-op for boys and girls lacrosse. The combined enrollment of those schools was 4,816 in the Illinois School Report Card for 2024-25. The IHSA [Illinois High School Association] voted nearly three-to-one to adopt a rule change in December making co-op teams whose schools’ combined enrollment is above 3,500 ineligible for state playoffs. The rule takes effect beginning in spring 2027 for lacrosse.
“I think lacrosse is impacted by this ruling but I don’t think lacrosse is the intended target,” said Andy Grisinger, head coach for the girls lacrosse team, in comments to the Normal West Paw Print student newspaper. Grisinger declined an interview with WGLT on the topic, but shared comments he made to that newspaper.
The rule impacts 108 Illinois schools across 19 sports. While the co-op rule mostly impacts schools in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs, it impacts the Bloomington-Normal lacrosse team and the Unit 5 Esports team.
“It makes lacrosse feel more like a club than a varsity sport,” said Grisinger.
How the IHSA views it
Matt Troha, assistant executive director of the IHSA, said the perception from many of the schools that voted in favor of the new rule was that there are some co-ops between schools that could sustain individual programs, but elect not to due to the amount of success the co-op team is having.
“[A co-op] is supposed to be a way to help schools that don't have enough students in a sport,” said Troha. “To get that sport going, be able to compete and hopefully over time, the sport grows enough at each of those schools that you're able to kind of break off and each school is able to have their own independent program.”
But Troha also said there is also a concern at the IHSA that certain teams included in this rule actually cannot sustain a team without a co-op. Take the Bloomington-Normal girls lacrosse team for example, which has existed since 2020. It won only its first sectional game before losing to a higher seed in each of the past three seasons. None of those teams entered sectionals with a winning record. In its only winning season to date, the team lost its opening game as a five-seed.
Further, for sports like lacrosse where there are no individual awards alongside team competition, he said that aspect adds to the likelihood that certain students become less likely to want to participate.
“We do expect that there'll probably be some bylaws proposals brought forward next year to maybe try and help alleviate that situation,” said Troha. “Whether it's just in the sports that don't have the individual option, or they'll try and seek some other kind of carve-outs.”
If ineligible teams decide they want to form an alternative tournament, Troha said teams would have to play less regular season games to make that possible. IHSA rules put a limit on the number of games teams can play within a season.
“If they carved out and made sure they had enough extra games to play any sort of tournament that they put together, I don't think that there would be any particular issue on our end for that,” said Troha.
Grisinger said there have been some discussions among people from impacted programs about an alternative tournament. Troha said none have been officially put together yet.
