The Alabama Independent School Association is an organization which sanctions and oversees high school athletics for approximately 40 private schools in the American state of Alabama.[1] Its offices are located on the campus of Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama.
The AISA was formed in 1967 as the Alabama Private School Association. Originally a group of eight schools, the membership grew to 60 by the 1971-72 school year.
The group sanctions varsity sports in football, basketball, baseball, fast-pitch softball, track and field, volleyball, golf, tennis, soccer, and cheerleading.[2] Schools are classified into three classes, according to student enrollment, with championships awarded by class.
The AISA is the largest private-school counterpart to the Alabama High School Athletic Association, which governs sports in all public schools in the state and approximately 50 private schools. In recent years, some of the AISA's larger schools have transferred to the AHSAA for various reasons.
The Alabama Sports Writers Association votes on the AISA's top football and basketball teams in its weekly polls, as a class separate from the AHSAA's six classes.
The AISA has been criticized over the years as comprising primarily so-called "segregation academies," private schools formed primarily for white students so that they would not have to attend schools with black students, after public school segregation was finally eliminated by law after the height of the civil rights movement. While the organization has never addressed the issue of schools which exist primarily to avoid desegregation, and the group has since admitted schools with multi-racial enrollment (including one school whose student body is almost entirely African-American), many schools originally formed as "seg academies" are still members of the AISA.