How many high school classifications does your state have?

Florida has eight in football, partly to create a de facto public-private split among small schools.

 

That would be the Michigan football tournament. If you go 6-3 (or 5-3 with eight games), you get in automatically. They then fill the field to 256 with 5-4 teams and the like, arrange the 256 schools by enrollment, divide into eight equal groups and go. (Next year it expands to nine champions as the state will be sanctioning an 8-man title game). It sounds convoluted and can be a pain for the writer types who want to figure out who's playing who ahead of time, but it actually works fairly well.

The base classifications in Michigan are Classes A-D, which are used directly only in basketball and volleyball (in football, they are used to determine 'playoff points,' that is, strength of victory, the main factor in seeding). Several other sports (baseball, softball, wrestling, track, etc.) are divided into 'nearly-equal divisions,' that is, all the schools fielding a team are divided into (usually four) equal groups. One other reminder is that several 'minor' sports have separate championships for the two peninsulas, which is to say that one can be a "U.P. State champion" in swimming, tennis, cross country, track and/or golf.

Due to the extremely convoluted demands of the MHSAA's loss in the infamous gender equity lawsuit, U.P. boys' soccer is required to be held in the 'wrong' (spring) season, though the handful (six, maybe?) of U.P. schools that sponsor it have a fall championship outside the MHSAA's sanction.

 

I could see that as being fairly easy to organize and execute in the Internet era, but it has to suck for a lot of football coaches who would like to get some scouting done during the season. Projecting even one or two rounds into a 32-team bracket is impossible, and it gets even worse if your school is close to one of the enrollment cutoffs.

 

I've never understood how the Southern Section broke down its sections for the playoffs. In everything except football, it's based on enrollment. For example, in the desert where I work, there's a school with about 3,000-plus enrollment and another school in its league with maybe 1,500 enrollment. In basketball, baseball, softball and volleyball, those two schools won't ever play each other in the playoffs. But in football, it's by geographic region. So 11-man football team that is 1,000 enrollment can play other school that is 3,000 enrollment. The only exception is 8-man football which has two divisions based on school size. I guess it saves some schools from being in the same playoffs as Centennial or Mater Dei.

 

The number of classes in Iowa vary. Five for football, four for some, three for some. Throw in the fact that there's one organizing body for boys sports and one for girls, and it can be the occasional train wreck.

 

Yep, never a dull moment for sure. The relegation system is new to the Central Section this school year and is still in need of some smoothing out. One of the girls basketball teams we cover is Div. III by enrollment, but after winning that Section three years ago, got bumped to Div. II, where they won Section the next two seasons. This past season, they were bumped to Div. I, with schools with 1,000 or so greater enrollment, and not only won again as top seed, but had running clock at the end of two of its three games. I'm assuming they'll play Div. V boys next year ...

MileHigh is right that Section titles do carry a bit more cred in a lot of sports, since outside of the sports I mentioned, Section was as far as you could go until recently. One problem in the Central Section is it's lumped in with SoCal schools for state regionals, while geographically its more tied to the north. Someone has to be cannon fodder for the LA-OC schools I guess. Synching seasons a problem as well. Soccer is a winter sport here, but a fall sport in some Sections and an spring sport in others.

 

Something I hated about Iowa's classifications: Most of the largest schools (Class 4A if I recall) only had to win two games to qualify for state in B-ball, because there are only 48 schools in Class 4A. Meanwhile, some schools in the smallest classification (Class 1A) had to win six or seven games to get to state, because there were like 140 teams in that classification.

Seemed grossly unfair to me, but I rarely heard complaints from coaches or fans, even of the small schools.

I never understood why those two single-sex sports organizing bodies (ugh) didn't take the total number of schools offering the sport and divide by four.

 

The problem is, that would make sense and I don't see the Southern Section willingly doing anything that makes sense

 

Oregon has six full-time classifications (6A to 1A) that apply to football, basketball, volleyball and track and field. All 1A schools (105 students or less) play 8-man football. Other sports will have fewer divisions in which they just combine the lower classes until there are enough teams (2A/1A for wrestling, baseball and softball; 3A/2A/1A for soccer, cross country and boys golf; 4A/3A/2A/1A for tennis, swimming and girls golf).

For the most part, 16 teams make the state tournament. Thirty-two 6A schools make state, meaning about a dozen don't. We just had realignment this year in which some leagues now have schools in multiple classes, so we seed teams with an RPI-like system. For the 6A, 5A and 4A schools, there are regionalized "play-in" games to make the field of 16 (all 6A and 5A schools are in these; 32 of the 4As are). 3A, 2A and 1A still have auto berths (top three in this league advance, top two in this one, etc.), and 1A basketball and volleyball have 24-team state tournaments (top three in each of the eight leagues).

The districts themselves are inconsistent, as the realignment has created "special districts" for a lot of sports. For example, there are four wrestling special districts (our 4A district literally is the merger of two leagues), and the top four in each weight class make state.

 

Agreed. Needles plays in the NIAA, instead of the long drives to the coast. Lake Tahoe area schools also compete in NIAA instead of the CIF's Sac-Joaquin Section (yes, I know everything's only 15 minutes away ...) and do occasionally win Nevada state titles. The San Francisco and Oakland sections dirtybird referenced served a purpose at one time, but can and should be absorbed into the Central Coast and North Coast Sections, respectively.

 

No kidding. It might be made more interesting if they added the private schools for basketball and baseball, but the five-class system just needs to go. As far as football, they have to be kept separate, or the private schools would drop football completely.