PSAL Follow-up Part 2

We are back with even more follow up after receiving more information from our readers. Thank you so much for reaching out and helping us fill in the gaps. We appreciate and encourage your input and contributions.

First, we’d like to correct a mistake we made about Columbia Secondary School. Not realizing they were a 6-12 school, we miscalculated their HS enrollment. They are a school of approximately 200 girls, not over 300 as we originally reported.

Second, a few readers helped clear up the Hunter question for us. Apparently it is considered a “non-public” school because it is funded by Hunter College and not the NYC DOE, which might make it the only non-public school to compete in the Public Schools Athletic League. But our readers were able to find the data and calculate that they have approximately 400 girls and around 24% of that population identifies as white.

Lastly, some readers reached out about the PSAL rule that probably kept Benjamin Berman out of the race. According to information we received, the PSAL rule about minimum meets was originally supposed to be three PSAL meets for each athlete in order to compete. That would have meant that two very highly ranked boys teams would not have been able to compete. As result, some very influential parents from an affluent Brooklyn neighborhood complained to the PSAL and they changed the rule at the last minute in order to let those schools compete.

In trying to remain impartial when reporting this information, please know that we have no way of knowing who complained or exactly why the PSAL changed the rule; we are just reporting what our readers told us. But we did receive a similar story from several different reader submissions.