The difference in a school with 900 and a school with 1,900 is far less on the field than the difference in a 100 student public school against a 450 student school. And 450-900 is less of a gap on the field than that, but still more than AAA.
Fairness is not having 29 in one class, then 95 in the other two. You could make 3 classes of the remaining 95 and it would balance out better.
Or we could go 8-man football for some of the smallest A schools.
Also, not sure why WV feels it has to be so rigid across the board. I wouldn't be totally against 4 classes for football (limit to 8 making playoffs), but staying at 3 classes for basketball.
And before anyone thinks I say this because of my alma mater, with the current numbers, they're going to be tied in with Bridgeport and Point Pleasant regardless. I really am looking out for the little guy...not the one that worries about enrollment at the top end.
Consolidation may be necessary in some cases but it isn't grandiose for everyone. This is clearly part of that. The Eastern Panhandle is adding schools and busting them apart and coming up with AAA-sized ones. I have to imagine Midland would be bursting at that size. That's a nearly 700 student increase in 15 years from what someone told me (although there could be confusion because numbers used to only be 10-12, not 9-12...even at that, it's a significant jump).
7 of the 16 schools that made the 1997 AAA playoffs are either AA or no longer exist. That's crazy to think about.
I'm not really spitting nails about it, but it will create logistical problems. There are a total of 5 AAA schools that exist between Princeton and Morgantown if you take US 19 off the turnpike to 79. That includes MoTown, University, Buckhannon-Upshur, Woodrow Wilson and Princeton. That's almost unbelievable.
Under the current basketball system, you will have AAA teams in 3-team sectionals who will get a bye to the sectional championship game, which means they'll automatically be in a regional. Basically, they could lose their first game, and they would still get a state tournament play-in game. I don't like that one bit. Especially when the smaller schools will have 7+ schools in the same section.
There's also a chance you'll end up with schools that have 25 baseball titles and 14 runner-ups in the past 31 years all in one regional. You could also end up with the softball regional of death, where literally the top 8 teams in the entire classification may be in one region, playing for one state tournament spot.
Lots of things wrong with the premise. Seems as though the small AAA's got catered to, at the expense of schools such as Hundred and other small public schools that will now be 4.5x smaller than the larger schools in their own division, with a much smaller drawing pool. That doesn't seem fair to me.
