Marty Hickman Quotations

No, no way. There's not even been discussion of it.

I believe there have been high school athletes in Illinois to use steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. It's probably a small number, but I think it would be naive to believe there hasn't been any usage. People like Jose Canseco have brought this to the forefront, and it isn't going away anytime soon.

Our membership felt that something had to be done to level the playing field.

My reaction is that I think it's great. I think it's a wonderful site and I'm hopeful that we'll be able to work something out to get back in there.

I think our member schools clearly think we needed to take some steps to level the playing field and this is the measure that will accomplish that at this moment.

The 37 schools that sued us agreed to this process and, quite frankly, I think it's time to move on and move forward and see how this works out.

We have had a wonderful experience at the University of Illinois the last several years.

The expansion of classes was supported by our membership, and as I've said in the past, we're a membership-driven organization. Those who voted favored this move.

We had a tremendous bid from Northern and we also had a tremendous big from the University of Illinois. At the end of the day our board concluded that we would return to the U of I.

We're thrilled to be able to celebrate our boys basketball centennial by directly involving the fans, who have supported our tournament in great numbers throughout the years is a fun was to get folks interested in our rich history and set the table for a terrific celebration in 2007.

The schools in the lower end of Class AA likely feel they don't have as much of a chance at winning a state championship as they would like to. Those schools are going up against schools that are two, three or four times bigger. We're looking to have competitive equity.

People had their chance, had their opportunity to respond. At this point, our board is committed to going through with this expansion. Now, if somebody collected some data saying they want to look further into this expansion, it's something we'd look at.

No, it really isn't. People who believe we have made a mistake by expanding the classes believe we will generate less revenue with this.

I know a lot of people think it will water things down, but they said that when we went to two classes. I think this will do a lot to help balance out the competition.

Class expansion has been one of those issues over the past decade that has repeatedly been brought to the forefront by member schools. However, until the membership was polled in the recent advisory referendum, there hadn't been the kind of support to warrant such an expansion.

All schools with no boundaries will be multiplied. There will be no waivers.