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Changes made to high school class sizes

Some schools will be changing classes in some sports for the 2018-19 school year after the New York State Public High School Athletic Association’s executive committee tweaked the classification system during its quarterly meeting Feb. 2 in Troy.

High schools in New York outside of New York City are divided into classes based on the number of students in each school; the classes, and how each team in them does in the regular season, are then used to help determine playoff matchups.

The class changes are for boys and girls basketball, boys and girls soccer, baseball and softball. Schools with 965 students and up will be Class AA. Those with from 500 to 964 students will be Class A; schools of from 270 to 499 attendees will be Class B; 150 to 269 students, Class C; and 149 or less, Class D. The class sizes for the current 2017-18 basketball season are as follows: Class AA, 910 students and up; Classes A1 and A2, 480 to 909 students; Classes B1 and B2, 280 to 479 students; Class C, 170 to 279 students; and Class D, 169 students or less.

Timm Slade, executive director of Section VI which covers western New York, said the proposal was originally made by Section X, which is north of Syracuse in the Adirondacks.

“They were trying to balance the numbers throughout the state of New York, basically the number of schools that participate in those classifications,” he said. The intent was to get as close as possible to the same number of schools in each class; with five classes, that would mean 20 percent of schools in each class.

However, because there are fewer large schools in upstate New York than small schools, Class AA wound up being 13.4 percent of the schools, with the other classes each slightly above 20 percent.

Westfield is the only school in the OBSERVER coverage area that is slated to change classes under the new system. It is currently in Class D and listed as having 157 students. The student number for 2018-19 is 167 students, putting the Wolverines’ teams in Class C.

However, Westfield Athletic Director Jake Hitchcock said moving between classes is something his school district is used to.

“For us, we have bounced back and forth between Class C and Class D for the past 6-7 years in most sports,” he said. “As we are merged with Brocton in some sports, counting the extra combined percentage will take us from 167 to 198 (in students) for 2018-19, so we would have been in Class C for boys and girls soccer, girls basketball, and softball regardless.

“The two sports where it will affect us is boys basketball and baseball,” he continued. “For the regular season we play a regional schedule, so that will not change, but it will affect us for the playoffs. We have traditionally had more success and made deeper playoff runs in Class D than in Class C.”

Another change that came out of the NYSPHAA meeting affects baseball games starting this spring. A “mercy rule” was enacted as a two-year experiment. Games will now end if there is a run differential of 10 or more after five innings, or four and a half innings if the home team is winning.

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