Picture the state wrestling championships in Columbia, with nearly 1,000 high school athletes competing to win more than 50 individual championships and four team titles.

It makes for a crowded three-day weekend, but it also accomplishes an important goal: ensuring more students can experience the state championships.

Three years ago, Missouri high school administrators added an extra class for wrestling, which crowns champions in 14 weight divisions. The addition appears permanent, though only 213 Missouri schools field wrestling teams — 44 less than the state's usual standard for four classes.

"It waters down some of the competition," said Gary Eagen, the Northwest High athletics director and former Francis Howell North wrestling coach. "I'm not taking anything away from the people that win. It was just a lot neater when it was not as many classes."

Winning a state championship remains the ultimate goal for many high school athletes, but a title might not mean what it once did. In the past decade, the playoffs in some sports have expanded even as the number of schools has not, a shift that demonstrates a gradual change in the focus of high school sports.

In the past 10 years, Missouri basketball and football each have added an extra class, and in 2008 football will double the number of teams in its playoffs. In Illinois, schools recently voted to add one class in some sports and two in others starting this year.

This has happened even though the Missouri State High School Activities Association has added just 13 member schools since 1990-91, according to data provided by the group.

Why do states like Missouri award seven football championships, including an eight-player division for smaller schools, when four was acceptable as recently as 26 years ago, with roughly the same number of schools competing?

Some coaches blame the media, which has helped create a culture in which students, fans and coaches believe winning is the only acceptable outcome. Others say youth sports have become increasingly professionalized, leading to a focus on championships. Still others say high school sports have simply evolved with the times, and that the old system of only a few state champions was inherently unfair.

"We're trying to appease all these people," Parkway North football coach Bob Bunton said. "It's getting a little out of hand."

FOCUS ON STYLE

When Lafayette athletics director Steve Miller coached high school football a quarter-century ago, he knew how many sacks or tackles his players had. But he never told them, and players never asked him to quantify their contribution.

Today, a visitor can hardly enter a high school locker room without a player bragging about "my numbers."

Most sports information was once delivered in short segments on the evening news or stories in the newspaper, and usually the focus was substance, not style. But today 24-hour sports cable stations have expanded, and the Internet has turned many fans into experts. Some coaches say the changes have brought a new focus on style in high school sports.

ESPN takes the brunt of the criticism. It shows highlights of game-winning home runs and touchdowns, not of sacrifice bunts or deft blocking. It shows championship celebrations, not first-round exits.

"ESPN stuff puts more emphasis on winning," said Scott Brown, CBC athletics director and baseball coach. "I really feel bad for that. I feel it's really unfortunate the kids get that way. This isn't college or the pros."

Bunton said the highlights promote individual fulfillment. "What it does is exposes young people to attention," he said. "Everyone wants a piece of the attention at some point, even if they don't earn it."

To be sure, players have always wanted to win state championships. But some suspect this increased attention on glory has caused administrators to reward students by giving them a better chance.

"The culture has gotten focused on outcome, the quick fix," said Richard D. Ginsburg, a Massachusetts psychologist specializing in adolescent athletes.

Area coaches also cite the Post-Dispatch, especially its website, www.stltoday.com, which features statistics for each player and team, and a forum in which users can anonymously post opinions about high school coaches and teams.

Forum threads over the summer asked whether the CBC baseball team is overrated and who is the worst coach in the St. Louis area. This, some say, puts additional pressure on coaches and players.

"At times it's aggravating," Bunton said. "You don't even know if it's a kid on your own team."

PRESSURE TO WIN

When Lafayette's Miller played high school football in the 1960s — he was in the final graduating class before Missouri turned to a playoff system in 1967-68 — players rarely lifted weights or drank protein milkshakes. And when a sport ended for a season, the players turned to the next one.

Now, because so many players work with personal trainers and compete in only one sport, Miller gives awards to athletes who compete in three sports for all four seasons. This spring he gave out just four awards, and Miller said that number was higher than most years. And at many schools, the majority of multi-sport athletes compete in sports like cross country and track, not football, basketball and baseball.

Just as in the professional ranks, today's teenage athletes tend to be specialized, and their coaches are under increased pressure to win.

"When I first started here, the kids were trying to find things to participate in," said Marty O'Hern, the Eureka athletics director. "They were in it for the love of the sport. Now everything is geared to getting a college scholarship. Almost every kid out there thinks that if they get on the varsity team, there's a college scholarship in their back pocket."

Ginsburg, the psychologist, said he sees the professionalism in children even before high school. "Younger kids are being asked to perform under the same intensity, the same hype," he said.

Football and basketball coaches say professionalism in high school sports has created a situation in which they can be fired if they do not win. Mark Johnson, president of the Missouri Football Coaches Association, said the coaches have responded by favoring proposals that expand the playoff systems.

This spring, he supported the proposal that doubled the number of Missouri football playoff teams. Johnson, the coach at Sedalia Smith-Cotton, said this development could help more coaches keep their jobs.

"It used to be if you were treating the kids right and developing young men, you could lose and everything would be OK," Johnson said. "Now you can still do those things, but if you're not winning, your job is going to be in jeopardy. That's the sad part of the sport."

Even with the expanded playoff system, Bunton said, some coaches still could lose their jobs if they do not win. And that, he said, would have been unthinkable even one decade ago.

"I can't believe a guy would be on the hot seat for not making the playoffs," he said. "We're in education."

MORE TROPHIES

Many coaches and administrators, however, say states have added more championships merely to make competition more enjoyable.

Dan Gould, director of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University, said the "making it good for the kids" phenomenon is the reason youth leagues award trophies to soccer, softball and baseball players regardless of whether a team finishes first or 10th.

It might also explain the more than 300 medalists at the Missouri wrestling championships.

"What happens is that they're used to trophies," Gould said. "When you stop with the trophies, it's sort of like, 'Why didn't I get the trophy?' "

Still, some coaches and administrators say the old system, in which only a handful of teams won championships in each sport and fewer individual athletes won medals, was unfair.

Take Indiana, which had a one-class basketball tournament until a decade ago. Though tiny Milan High won the 1954 championship — a triumph that spawned the movie "Hoosiers" — big schools won the championship every year afterward, and the small schools were nearly always overmatched.

Blake Ress, who started coaching high school football in 1964 and is now the commissioner of the Indiana High School Athletic Association, said few complained about the one-class system until the mid-1990s, when smaller schools decided they no longer wanted to lose every year. Schools with enrollments of less than 500 were playing schools with more than 2,000 students, and yet for years the small schools just accepted it.

Fairness was also an issue in Illinois, which, with two classes in most sports, awarded fewer state championships than most states. Citing the desire to give smaller schools more opportunities, the IHSA board discussed the situation for two seasons and voted in January 2006 to add classes. The move could cause travel difficulties for the Metro East's larger schools because there are only eight 4A schools in the area, but board member Paul Whittington said board support for the proposal was nearly unanimous.

"It offers smaller schools lots of opportunities they may not have," said Whittington, the East Peoria principal. "You're going to give more kids opportunities to be a state champion."

Highland, for example, hasn't won a state title in its 100-year history. Its enrollment is about 1,100, and it competes against schools such as Edwardsville, which has about 2,400 students. Its best finish is a third place, by the football team in 1989. Now it will compete against similarly sized schools.

"That'll be a bonanza for us," Highland athletics director Steve Lanxon said. "We don't have as many athletes to choose from."

For some, the shift in championships signifies an increased emphasis on leveling competition in high school athletics.

"As much as people want things to be the same as they were in 1950, they're not," Ress said. "It's evolution."

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