Only days before an epic winter storm played havoc with most of the state, the Alabama High School Athletic Association did some shuffling around of its own.
But unlike Mother Nature, most of the AHSAA’s January work may have been an overall positive event.
The biggest story coming out of Executive Director Steve Savarese’s office was the expansion of the state’s overall classifications from six to seven. That’s the first increase since the old 1A-4A classifications went to 1A-6A in 1984.
The new Class 7A looks a lot like the much hyped “super-classification,” which had been discussed by AHSAA officials and coaches for years. Class 7A will feature the 32 largest schools in enrollment, aligned in four regions. The largest school in the class is–of course–Hoover with 1,978 students enrolled in grades 10-12. The smallest is James Clemens with barely more than 1,000 enrollees.
Smaller classifications were divided more equally. There are 60 schools in Class 6A, 61 in 5A, 60 in 3A, 58 in 2A and 58 in 1A.
All the new divisions will take effect in the 2014-15 academic year.
The best news for Over the Mountain fans is that all of the larger area schools are once again grouped in the same region. Class 7A’s Region 3 will include Hoover, Mountain Brook, Oak Mountain, Spain Park and Vestavia Hills in addition to Hewitt-Trussville, Thompson and Tuscaloosa County.
The new setup will end oddities of recent seasons where, for example, Spain Park and Oak Mountain were playing long-distance opponents such as Wetumpka and Stanhope Elmore as region games while not playing neighborhood rivals. This was the college equivalent of Alabama playing Oregon or Pittsburgh in a conference game but not Auburn or Tennessee.
“Our new region is going to give coaches gray hair, but it’s going to be great for the media,” said Mountain Brook coach Chris Yeager. “You guys are going to have a great game to cover every week.”
The new arrangement will certainly improve attendance and gate receipts as well. From a fan interest standpoint, for instance, a Mountain Brook-Spain Park game is an infinite improvement over Mountain Brook-Woodlawn.
Former 5A schools in the area will move up to the new Class 6A, where Briarwood, Homewood and John Carroll Catholic will share Region 5 with Hueytown, Jackson-Olin, Minor, Pelham and Walker. The bad news for all of the new Class 6A schools is that they will have to compete with programs that previously were powers in the large-school classification. If a Briarwood or Homewood were to win a state championship, they would likely have to play perennially-strong Clay-Chalkville or Oxford, two schools with much higher enrollments.
Briarwood coach Fred Yancey admitted he’s not a fan of the new alignment.
“I don’t really like it,” he said. “Like everyone else, I don’t really know how it’s going to look at the end. We’ve got plenty of tough games in our region and, looking down the road, we may have to face some schools that were in the highest classification if we go far enough in the playoffs.”
Yancey, who coached in Tennessee for years before coming to Briarwood nearly 25 years ago, said he much preferred the old six-classification arrangement.
“It always seemed unusual to me that we had six classifications in Alabama,” he said. “There are states with larger populations that don’t have that many (classifications.) But it seemed to work so well, I would have left it alone.”
Nobody could fairly accuse Yancey of ducking tough games. His Lions had a home-and-home series with Class 6A’s Vestavia for years and faces Oak Mountain next fall.
“This is just going to be one of those things that will be better for some schools and worse for others,” Yancey said.
The AHSAA Central Board of Control also voted to allow football teams to have 11 weeks to play 10 games. Schools may choose to play a non-region opponent Aug. 21-23 and then have 10 weeks to play the remaining nine regular season games.
Oak Mountain coach Cris Bell said he won’t take that option.
“We’re going to play our jamboree and then play 10 weeks in a row,” he said. “If anything, I wish they had pushed the start of the season back a week. Something just doesn’t seem right about starting the season in late August. But I know they (the AHSAA) have contracts with Auburn and Tuscaloosa about when to play the championship games at the end of the season.”
Next year’s arrangement means Oak Mountain will be adding the likes of Hoover, Vestavia and Mountain Brook to its region worksheet, but Bell said his Eagles won’t back down from the challenge.
“There are two ways to look at it,” Bell said. “One is that we have to play those guys. The other way is that we get the opportunity to play them. We’re going to look at it the second way. It’s kind of like being in the Southeastern Conference. Everybody wants to join it because the SEC plays the best college football in America. We’re looking forward to seeing where we are in relation to these schools that have been successful for a long time.”
Yeager’s biggest concern with the new Class 7A format is that only the top four teams of each region will qualify for postseason play.
“That’s 16 teams out of 32,” he said. “That means some very good football teams are going to be staying home.”
As Yancey points out, the seven-classification format is not perfect. From a local perspective, the best positive tradeoff is the return of close community rivalries, complete with the media and fan interest—and higher ticket sales–they attract. For that reason alone, the new setup is worth a try.
The AHSAA made alignment changes in other sports as well, and the impact of those is a topic for another column. Suffice it to say that Alabama high school sports’ governing body is rolling the proverbial dice and hoping it will come up with a Lucky Seven.