The Competitive Balance Proposal, an Ohio High School Athletic Association initiative to address a perceived athletic imbalance among member schools, failed by a 339-301 vote on Wednesday.

It’s the second straight year the referendum issue did not pass. Last year the CBP failed by a slightly closer 332-303 margin. That was the only one of 14 issues that school principals didn’t pass during voting from May 1-15.

OHSAA Commissioner Dr. Dan Ross said he does not plan to pursue the proposal.

“The schools have spoken,” he said. “I don’t anticipate getting the committee back together and bringing another proposal back to the membership.”

Had the proposal passed, it would have affected how football, soccer, volleyball, basketball, baseball and softball — all team sports — would be divvied into divisions. With its defeat, teams will continue to be lumped into divisions based solely on boys or girls student enrollment.

The CBP would have placed teams in divisions based on combined enrollment/boundary, socioeconomic and tradition factors. A numerical value of those three factors would have been given to each school. The higher the number, the larger the division.

The proposal was the culmination of a two-year effort by a group of northeast Ohio superintendents who documented how private schools — mostly Catholic — were winning a majority of state championships.

They successfully appealed to the OHSAA to address their findings.

Ross said with this defeat, the group likely will propose a tournament split from private and public schools. That would be voted on next spring.

A public/private split has been voted on twice and soundly defeated in 1978 and ’91.

“I don’t believe that separation makes it better,” he said.

“We can make what we currently do better and keep everybody together.”

Fenwick High School principal Mike Miller was among those who voted against the CBP. A small Division IV school in football, Fenwick is lumped with Chaminade Julienne, Alter and Carroll in the Greater Catholic League North Division.

“I couldn’t vote for it because it was something that would negatively impact my school,” he said. “We’d be penalized for having success in some sports.”

The tradition factor was a unique part of the formula.

Essentially, the more teams won the more formula points they would receive. That could mean the difference of staying or moving up a division.

That was tweaked by a CBP committee just this spring to include the past eight years rather than the initial four.

“The tradition factor penalizes too many people’s success,” Miller said. “That’s going to be a major stumbling block for people.”

Ross insisted a perceived imbalanced playing field — and how to address it — will continue to smolder.

“This was at least an effort in trying to do that,” he said. “There are many schools in this state who honestly believe that they do not have a fair shot of dealing in their tournaments.”