Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools
The Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools, or TAPPS, is an organization headquartered in the Lone Star Tower at Texas Motor Speedway Fort Worth, Texas.[1] It was formerly headquartered at the Salado Civic Center in Salado, Texas.[2][3]
Predecessor
History[edit]
TAPPS was chartered in 1978 with a membership of 20 schools. As of 2022 TAPPS lists their school membership at 230 with a combined enrollment of over 40,000 students. [6] As early as 2013, TAPPS was using a proprietary software called TAPPSter to provide schools with online management tools for athletics and fine arts departments.[7] In 2019 TAPPS signed a State Management contract with Rank One to serve schedules and game results to schools in their membership. [8]
Like the UIL, TAPPS aligns member schools into districts by geography and enrollment size for various contests. Each contest has a slightly different alignment based on the participating schools, but most follow the same basic framework. The districts are mostly decided behind closed doors by TAPPS every even year (in February, around the same time as the UIL's biannual redistricting), and are an attempt to keep schools within a certain distance of their home town when attending competitions. Like the UIL, the districts are the first progression to the state championship.
Schools are further broken down with a letter classification to separate them from other schools of varying sizes. The purpose is ensure that schools compete only with others with similar size talent pools and resources.
Due to the wide variety of sports that some schools do and do not offer, and because some schools are single-sex, TAPPS uses several different classifications for sports (generally the larger the number the larger the school):
