Changes should be made

Updated: March 23, 2011 2:26PM

Friday night is the premier night for high school sports.

Football is king on autumn Friday nights. Schedule another high school event against a football game and plan to have an empty building.

Basketball rules the roost on Friday night from November to March.

Most of the time the big games are played on Friday night. It guarantees the maximum audience, especially among students, after five days of "us against them" buildup in school.

Unless you're in girls sports.

If you're a girl playing basketball, almost always, you're relegated to Thursday night.

A school night. The night before the big night.

Thursday night is afterthought night. As in, "Well, we have to schedule girls games some time. Why not Thursday? That'll do."

It might do, but it can be done better, especially now, with the girls playoffs in full swing.

Here's how: The championship games in girls regional and sectional play, in all four classes, should be played on Friday night. No exceptions.

No other action will more quickly build interest in girls play beyond that of parents, boyfriends and relatives, and help elevate it to status closer to that of boys basketball, than playing on the big night.

For two Friday nights a season, it can be done.

In the Southland, the Thursday night wasteland has been a dumping ground for girls sports for next to forever. The South Suburban Conference tried to play some girls basketball games on Fridays after the league was formed from the ashes of SICA, but the concept didn't work when boys games were also played on Friday. So, when Shepard hosted Reavis in girls basketball, Reavis hosted Shepard in boys basketball.

"The crowds ended up splitting," Shepard athletic director Gawaine Perkins said. "Our fans watched us play Reavis away."

That, it quickly became clear, was the wrong way to go about it.

The right way is to move boys games to either Thursday night or Saturday - afternoon or evening - for the two weekends the girls take center stage. That's done at Oak Forest.

"I've always been a proponent of playing on Friday for girls," Bengals athletic director Sue Bonner said. "You switch the boys to Thursday. I've even put wrestling on Friday night for Senior Night."

There are 64 girls basketball regionals in Class 3A and 4A. A quarter of them, 16, scheduled their championship game on a Friday. The other 48 were played on Thursday, including all 10 played in our area: Bremen, Crete-Monee, Evergreen Park, Hillcrest, Mother McAuley, Providence Catholic, Queen of Peace, Shepard, Thornton and T.F. North. The Thursday-heavy schedule was even more pronounced in 1A and 2A.

"I don't understand, in this era of fighting for equality, the IHSA doesn't arrange for playing on Friday nights," Bonner said. "Right now, they give you the option."

If those regional games are played on Friday night, doesn't the attendance go up? Surely more than the 200 who turned out at McAuley for the Mighty Macs' rout of Oak Lawn are on hand. Certainly the 300-odd folks at Shepard for Marist-Sandburg have more company. And the sparse gallery for the Rich South-Oak Forest regional final at Bremen has to climb above 200, does it not?

Likewise, look at this week, with every sectional final slated for Thursday night. Wouldn't crowds at Rich East and Lincoln-Way North be bigger - say, pull out both sides of the bleachers bigger - on a Friday night instead of a Thursday night?

If crowds climb by 20 percent for the girls games and hold even for the boys, the move is a rousing success. But this has to be a multiyear commitment, not a one-year, two-week experiment.

"We could change things around, but old-time traditional die-hard fans will say, guys go to watch guys games," Perkins said. "And girls are used to playing on Thursdays, and fans are used to watching the girls on Thursday nights."

True, true and true.

Perkins, generally in favor of the idea, added, "It's something that would take time to get used to."

All the more reason to start as soon as possible. Say, 2012.

When H.V. Porter, the IHSA administrator who came up with the phrase "March Madness" in 1939, penned "Basketball Ides of March" in 1942, he wrote of fans crossing the state in a "good will flight on a Friday night." A big game on Thursday? It doesn't have the same ring to it.

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