The Ballot Isn’t Set Yet, But the Fight Is: 25 IHSA Bylaw Proposals, From a 2.5 Multiplier to Fewer Games

November 3, 2026

All of the IHSA proposals (pdf)

The IHSA has published the full text of the bylaw proposals submitted for its 2026-27 legislative cycle: 25 proposals, numbered 0 through 24. None of them is law yet, and most of them may never reach a membership vote. But taken together, they are the clearest picture yet of what Illinois schools are arguing about — competitive balance above all, and then, in a second wave, how much high school sports should ask of kids.

The process, as IHSA Associate Executive Director Matt Troha described it in late October: the Legislative Commission begins its work in early November, town meetings follow, and the Commission decides around November 23 which proposals make the all-school ballot. If a proposal makes it, member schools vote December 1-15, with results announced December 16. Proposal 0 — the multiplier proposal — is marked in the PDF as “To Be on Ballot.”

Here is what is in the packet, grouped by the fight it belongs to.

The competitive-balance fight: three different answers

Three proposals take three different runs at the same problem — non-boundaried schools, which can draw students from beyond a geographic attendance boundary, winning a disproportionate share of postseason trophies — and they do not obviously fit together. Schools may have to choose among them, or sort out how they would interact if more than one passed.

Proposal 0: Raise the multiplier from 1.65 to 2.5. Submitted by Adam Eucker, official representative at Williamsville, on behalf of the Sangamo Conference. This is the bluntest instrument in the packet. It would change By-law 3.170 so a 2.5 enrollment multiplier, rather than 1.65, is added to every non-boundaried school, with the existing Board waiver process kept in place and a subcommittee of IHSA staff and Legislative Commission members developing the waiver policy. The rationale says the 1.65 figure dates to the two-class era and was never recalibrated for today’s multi-class system and population density, and that schools would be able to see their projected classifications before voting. It would take effect at the end of the current classification cycle, which runs through the 2026-27 school year. The proposal includes links to data on non-boundaried trophy winners over the past 13 seasons and to current versus proposed enrollments and classifications.

Proposal 8: Separate classifications for boundaried and non-boundaried schools. Submitted by the West Suburban Conference. This is the structural answer. In any sport with three or more classifications, one classification would be made up exclusively of non-boundaried schools, regardless of enrollment, and the remaining classifications would be boundaried schools only, distributed as evenly as practicable by enrollment. The non-boundaried classification would carry the highest designation in that sport. It would apply only if every resulting classification would have at least 112 State Series entries; otherwise the sport keeps its current structure, and sports whose classifications are not based solely on enrollment are also exempt. Football gets its own section: eight classifications, six for boundaried schools and two for non-boundaried schools, with 75 percent of playoff berths allocated to boundaried schools and 25 percent to non-boundaried schools, qualifiers selected separately within each group, and unfilled berths not transferred to the other group. The Board would set enrollment cutoffs annually.

Proposal 15: Separate qualifying quadrants, one champion. Submitted by the same West Suburban Conference group. This is the version of the separate-paths idea the IHSA’s Competitive Balance Committee has been discussing since the summer, now written as a bylaw. The Board would be authorized to assign boundaried and non-boundaried schools to separate qualifying quadrants in any sport culminating in a four-team semifinal field: three quadrants of boundaried schools only, one quadrant of non-boundaried schools only, so three semifinal berths go to boundaried schools and one to a non-boundaried school. The Board would have full discretion over quadrant size, geography, seeding and assignment, and could use different systems for different sports. The proposal stresses that it preserves one state champion per classification — the paths merge at the semifinals — and gives the Board similar discretion for sports that do not end in a four-team semifinal. This differs from the earlier committee version discussed in July, which would have put seven public schools and one non-public school into the Elite Eight before the paths intersected, and from the Board-policy version discussed in October, which would have put all non-boundaried schools in a class into one quadrant so only one could reach the semifinals. Proposal 15 fixes the semifinal split at 3-1.

Making bylaws harder to change

Proposals 1 and 2, both submitted by Dan Tully, principal at Niles (Notre Dame), and Tim McConnell, principal at Erie, would raise the bar for future amendments in two places. Proposal 1 would raise the petition threshold for putting a proposal on the ballot after the Legislative Commission declines to do so, from 20 percent of member-school principals to 50 percent. Proposal 2 would raise the passage threshold for a bylaw amendment from a simple majority of votes cast to a two-thirds supermajority. The rationale for both is the same: changes should show broad, durable support rather than a narrow or temporary majority, and a proposal that passes barely over 50 percent can remain divisive and be reversed the next year.
Cooperative teams: four proposals, one 3,500-student line

Four proposals circle the cooperative-team rules, and in particular By-law 2.030(h), the rule that took effect this school year barring co-op teams with a combined enrollment over 3,500 from competing as a team for State Series team trophies and plaques (individuals may still compete).

Proposal 3 would expand private-school co-ops. Submitted by a group of principals and official representatives led by Jeff Reed of Rochester, it would keep co-op eligibility for private schools with non-multiplied enrollments of 200 or less in all sports and activities, and open co-ops to private schools up to 900 in single-class sports — boys and girls lacrosse, girls flag football, swimming and diving, bowling, water polo, girls gymnastics, girls badminton and boys volleyball — with no competition restriction. In multi-class sports, those larger private-school co-ops could form and play the regular season only; in individual-entry sports (tennis, golf, track and field, wrestling, cross country) students could represent their home school in the State Series, while in soccer, baseball, softball, competitive cheerleading and competitive dance they could not compete in the State Series as a team or as individuals. The submitters say only 53 private schools can currently form co-ops under the 200 cap, and raising it to 900 would add 56 more. The proposal also adds an appeal to the IHSA Board for a school denied co-op approval by a conference or by the seven schools on its schedule.

Proposal 4 would exempt a narrower set of emerging, team-only single-class sports from the 3,500 limit: boys and girls lacrosse, boys and girls water polo, boys volleyball and girls flag football. Submitted by a central Illinois group led by Joe Alstat of Washington, it argues those sports are still growing, many schools cannot sustain them alone, and barring their co-ops from the State Series as a team could kill programs. It would take effect 30 days after passage.

Proposal 5 would eliminate the 3,500 limit entirely and restore the eligibility provisions in place before the 2026-27 school year. Submitted by a southwest suburban group led by Dan Arntzen of Oswego, it argues the restriction penalizes students in large multi-school districts — particularly in facility-dependent sports such as swimming, water polo and gymnastics — based solely on combined enrollment. It would take effect 30 days after passage.

Proposal 6, from the same submitters as Proposal 5, is the middle path: co-ops over 3,500 could compete for team awards only if all the schools in the co-op are governed by the same Board of Education and demonstrate a specific need, such as a lack of facilities or insufficient participation, as approved by the IHSA Board. If such a co-op wins a State Series team trophy, the Board would have to reevaluate the co-op before the next school year. The proposal would also end the abbreviated renewal process: every co-op agreement would have to submit a full application every two years, with updated participation figures and documented facility constraints. It would take effect 30 days after passage.

Residence and transfers: the Competitive Balance Committee package

Five proposals rework who is eligible, and where — three of them from the Competitive Balance Committee, which finalized its transfer and residence changes in October.

Proposal 9, from Paul Karafiol, principal at Chicago (Lake View), would affirm residence eligibility when a student’s residence is in the district even if the family has moved outside that school’s attendance boundary, provided the district allows continued enrollment and the student attended that school the previous term (or, for a freshman, attended seventh and eighth grade in the district). The rationale cites multi-school districts where students are now forced to transfer when a family moves within the district, and a study finding that transferring high schools sharply lowers the chance of enrolling in college.

Proposal 10, from Tully and McConnell on behalf of the Competitive Balance Committee, would tighten the children-of-employees exception: eligibility at the school where a parent works would require the parent to be a full-time certified staff member — restoring language the submitters say was loosened and then abused for athletically motivated reasons — and in unit districts with one high school, tuition-free attendance under the exception could be elected only once in a student’s high school career, with timing in compliance with the transfer bylaw.

Proposal 11, also from Tully and McConnell for the committee, is housekeeping: it writes the current practice of completing the Principal’s Concurrence form through the online Transfer Management System into By-law 3.041.

Proposal 12, the centerpiece of the committee package, would rewrite the transfer rules. In short: a student would have full eligibility on a first transfer before the start of sophomore year. After the start of sophomore year, a transfer would bring only limited eligibility for 365 days, unless the family moves more than 30 miles and a parent provides documentation of an employment relocation necessitating the move, in which case full eligibility would result. The proposal would remove the other carveouts now in By-law 3.043.3 — first-time enrollment in a home public school, change in family financial position, and extenuating circumstances documented by the sending principal — leaving the 30-mile-plus-employment move as the lone exception, and it would delete By-law 3.044 (orphans, children of divorced or unmarried parents, and wards of the state) so those students fall under the same 3.043 provisions. The committee’s stated aim is a middle ground: a penalty-free early choice of school, then a real deterrent to athletically motivated transfers later, while expanding lower-level eligibility so transferring students can still participate.

Proposal 13, from Karafiol, would permit transfer eligibility when a student moves to live with the other parent, without requiring a court-ordered change of custody, provided the parent the child is moving to has lived in the school’s attendance area (for boundaried schools), the district (for public non-boundaried schools), or within 30 miles of the school (for non-public schools) for at least six months, with documentation establishing parentage and no switch back to the first parent in the previous 12 months. The rationale argues the current custody-documentation requirement falls hardest on low-income and minoritized families, for whom formal custody papers may never have existed or may be costly to obtain.

Football: undoing the expansion, and one safety valve

Proposal 16 is the full text of the Camp Point Central proposal reported in October — and it goes further than the qualifier count. Submitted by Zak Huston, principal at Camp Point (Central), it would restore the 2025-26 football practice, contest and preseason schedules, including the 0-week scrimmage and a first practice day on Monday of Week 6, with the first varsity contest no earlier than Thursday of Week 8. It restores the 12-practice-day requirement before a contest (eight before a preseason scrimmage, in Week 7), caps the season at nine games plus one preseason scrimmage, and restores the 256-team playoff field — 32 qualifiers per class, with the 48-team format and its opening-round byes discontinued and the playoffs running Weeks 17 through 21. The rationale is student well-being and summer break: practice would start August 4 in 2027, August 2 in 2028 and August 1 in 2029 under the restored calendar, and the proposal argues two full weeks of practice before school starts creates transportation barriers and takes a week off the end of students’ summers. Its listed cons concede the trade: 128 fewer playoff berths statewide, possible scheduling and revenue effects. It would take effect 30 days after passage. (Coach and athletic director Brad Dixon announced the push on WRMJ Sportsline in September; Huston is the submitting principal named in the PDF.)

Proposal 17, from David Hawkins, principal at Rochester, would let two football schools that both had opponents cancel after the season start date schedule a game between themselves as an exhibition — no playoff points at stake, no forfeit win banked instead of playing. The rationale: cancellations are becoming more common as participation declines, teams would rather take a forfeit win than risk a loss, and losing one game wipes out more than 10 percent of a nine-game season.

Fewer games, more rest

A bloc of proposals from the same four submitters — Filberto Torres of Riverside (Riverside-Brookfield), Tony Millard of Lombard (Glenbard East), John Woods of Libertyville and Justin Cooper of Vernon Hills — would cut regular-season contest maximums across sports, on the same stated ground: Illinois plays more games than its neighboring states, and the pressure to schedule to the maximum leaves students little practice time, rest or time off the stage. Each proposal lists the same con: schools would have to choose which games or tournaments to drop.

Proposal 18: Boys and girls soccer, 25 games to 22.

Proposals 19 and 20: Girls flag football — start practice Wednesday of Week 5 and contests Saturday of Week 6, aligning with tackle football, and cut the contest limit from 25 to 22. The submitters say if the State Series is pushed back, they would consider pulling the proposals.

Proposal 21: Boys and girls volleyball, 35 contests to 31.

Proposal 22: Boys and girls basketball, 31 games to 28.

Proposal 23: Boys baseball and girls softball, 35 games to 31.

Proposal 14, from Monica Burkholder, principal at Lanark (Eastland), would add a second mandatory no-contact period to the summer without cutting the 20 summer contact days: the seven calendar days immediately before the first allowable practice date for each fall sport (Sunday of Week 5 for winter and spring sports), alongside the existing week containing July 4. During those periods there would be no sport-specific coaching, organized team activity, camp, clinic or school-represented competition. The rationale is predictable family time and a real break before a fall season that can run three or four months.

Proposal 7, from Amy Boscolo, official representative at Edwardsville, would let multiple-school golf activities begin as early as 7:00 a.m. on a school day, rather than the 1:00 p.m. floor that applies to other multiple-school activities — an answer to extreme heat, daylight limits late in the season and course availability in a roughly 60-day season. Schools could still decline an early-start invitation.

One more: coaches’ ejections

Proposal 24, from Matt Myers, official representative at Buffalo Grove, would give schools a narrow way to challenge a coach’s next-contest suspension when an ejection resulted from an official’s misapplication of a playing rule. The ejection itself would stand, but the school — not the coach — could ask the Executive Director to review the rule application, and if the Executive Director finds a misapplication, the next-contest ineligibility could be waived. The proposal notes similar language already exists for player ejections in By-law 6.011 but not for coaches in 6.012.
What happens next

Again: this is a list of proposals, not a ballot. The Legislative Commission will hear them, town meetings will test them with member schools, and around November 23 the Commission will decide which ones go to a vote of all member schools December 1-15, with results December 16. The multiplier proposal is already marked to be on the ballot. The rest will have to earn their way there — and under Proposal 2, if it passes first, future proposals would need two-thirds to pass at all.