Two Eras of Tennessee Private Schools

When I started pulling tuition and enrollment numbers for Tennessee's private schools, I assumed they were all roughly the same kind of place. They are not. Baylor charges $62,000 a year and was chartered in 1893. The Christian academy down the road charges $14,000 and opened its doors the year after court-ordered desegregation reached its county.

Those are not the same institution wearing different jerseys. They were founded in different centuries, for different families, with different missions, and the gap between them shapes everything that follows in this series. This first report is the context: who these schools are, when they were built, and why. The companion report takes the academics and the money and asks what actually predicts soccer success. Here, I just want to lay out the landscape.

One decade towers over the rest. The 1970s produced more private high schools than any other ten-year stretch in the state's history, far more than the decades on either side of it. That spike is not a coincidence of soccer, a sport that barely existed in Tennessee high schools at the time. It is the footprint of something much larger.

Across the South, private-school enrollment grew by more than 200,000 students between the mid-1960s and 1980 as federal courts forced public-school desegregation and white families looked for an exit.¹ Historians have a name for the institutions founded in that window, "segregation academies," and Tennessee has its share.² Not every school founded in the 1970s fits that description; plenty were genuinely religious foundations that would have opened regardless. But the timing of the wave is unmistakable, and many of the programs now competing for Division II soccer titles trace their charters to exactly those years.

The split matters for soccer because the two eras compete in the same Division II bracket but bring wildly different resources to it. An old-guard school like Baylor (girls ELO over 2,000, second in the state) sits on more than a century of facilities and fundraising. A 1970s foundation like Briarcrest, made nationally famous by The Blind Side, reached a boys ELO over 1,800 on a fraction of the tuition. Both win. They just got there from opposite starting lines.

By the 1990s, the success of these schools on the field had become a political problem for the TSSAA. After private schools dominated the 1995 football championships, the association's legislative council voted to split schools that offered athletic financial aid into a separate Division II, beginning in 1997.³ When even the smaller, tuition-only faith-based schools kept winning, the TSSAA added a 1.8× enrollment multiplier in 2004, bumping private schools up a classification.³ In 2018 it finished the job and moved essentially all private schools into Division II.³

The fight over where that line belongs is older and sharper than most people remember. It produced Brentwood Academy v. TSSAA, a recruiting-rules dispute that went to the U.S. Supreme Court twice. There is no clearer statement of how differently a private school and a public school sit inside the same athletic association. I covered that case and the broader public-private divide in detail in Football Runs Tennessee. For soccer, the practical takeaway is simple: when a private school shows up in the ELO rankings, it is usually playing, and recruiting, under a different set of rules than the public school next door.

If the 1970s founding wave was partly about white flight, the enrollment data shows a slow, partial unwinding of it. I'm pulling these demographics from the NCES Private School Universe Survey, splitting each school into White and Athlete of Color, the latter combining Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic, Black, and Indigenous students. Tennessee's private schools started this window overwhelmingly white and have diversified gradually: not dramatically, and not to the point of mirroring the public-school population, but steadily. The toggles let you slice that by tuition tier, religious affiliation, or grand division; a dedicated diversity report is still on the list, but the schools founded in one era clearly have not stood still in the next.

There was never a "small Baylor." The old-guard schools were built large and have stayed large; the growth in the chart above comes mostly from the second-era schools scaling up and from more of them reporting over time. That matters for the next report, because size turns out to be one of the things that tracks with winning: a bigger private school has a bigger pool to draw its eleven from, and the data shows it.

The newest force acting on these schools is public money. Tennessee passed an Education Savings Account voucher program in 2019, tied up in court until it launched in the 2022–23 school year, that paid private-school tuition for low-income students in exactly three counties: Davidson, Shelby, and Hamilton.⁴ In 2025 the legislature went further with the Education Freedom Scholarship Act, making vouchers of roughly $7,300 available statewide.⁵ The statewide version is too new to read anything into. But the three-county pilot has run for three seasons now, which is a small natural experiment. The voucher money landed in three counties and not the rest, so I compared each private program's ELO in the four years before the pilot (2018–2022) against its ELO after (2022–present), and stacked the pilot-county programs against every other private program as a control.

Three seasons in, there is no voucher effect visible in the soccer. The pilot-county private programs improved by less, on average, than the private programs that got no voucher money at all, and the pilot group is split almost evenly between programs that rose and programs that fell. That fits what the state predicted: most voucher dollars went to families already in private school⁵, so the rosters didn't necessarily change. The per-program picture below is mixed by design; a few schools jumped, others slid, and the counties don't move together.