Category Archives: Reclassification

Get caught up. Read part 1 and part 2.

The competitive struggles for the schools at the bottom of Class 3A aren’t revelations. In fact, they were the crux of a five-classification proposal made in 2012 by the Wyoming Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association — a proposal so tempting that the WHSAA delayed reclassification for a year to discuss it before ultimately rejecting it.

The problem in the WIAAA proposal was the difficulties inherent in five classifications, such as increased travel and problems with scheduling state tournaments, were just too much for the WHSAA to overlook.

The WIAAA was onto something, though. Its proposal tried to address the issues with competitiveness and with the shrinking schools in Class 3A. Just one look at what the WIAAA’s proposal would have done to 3A (shrink it from 16 to nine schools) and what it would have done to 1A (add one school) makes that clear.

The issue is 3A. Obviously.

But Wyoming doesn’t need, and can’t accommodate, five classifications for all of its sports. The WHSAA was right to reject the WIAAA proposal. With only 71 high schools, and only 67 that consistently offer the traditional gamut of volleyball, basketball and track, this state does not have enough schools and has too much distance between them to justify five classes for all its sports. We’ve seen what five classes and scheduling for competitive equity did to football — games got worse as travel distances increased.

The time for change is near, though. The next reclassification cycle, which will classify schools for the 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years, will give the WHSAA a unique opportunity. Thunder Basin High School is scheduled to open in Gillette in the fall of 2017. It will likely be a fully fledged 4A school by the fall of 2018. By default, TBHS’s entry into the Wyoming high school sports scene will force changes beyond Gillette; at minimum, the smallest 4A school (now Jackson) would go to 3A, the smallest 3A (now Lyman) would go to 2A, the smallest 2A (now Upton) would go to 1A.

I think a tweak to the existing classification system — one that would be timely given the changes TBHS’s classification will spur — might prove helpful.

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In the fall of 2018, the WHSAA should move 3A’s four smallest schools to Class 2A for all sports except football. That small change would help redraw Wyoming’s classification boundaries at 12-12-24-rest, as Class 2A would expand from 20 to 24 schools. Class 1A would go from 21 to 22 schools (24, if you count Arapahoe Charter and Fort Washakie Charter) to accommodate the bump from Thunder Basin.

Such a move could also brings up the opportunity for congruence between Wyoming’s football and basketball classifications, something that hasn’t happened since 1990 when the state moved to five classifications for football. With existing programs, 11-man football could be split into four equal divisions of 12 schools apiece based on the cutoffs for all other sports. (Class 4A football would go from 10 to 12 schools and 2A and 1A 11-man from 14 to 12.)

Using enrollment figures used for the 2016-18 reclassification cycle, here’s how the classifications (and, for argument’s sake, potential conference alignments) would shake out:

For all sports but football
4A East: Gillette, Thunder Basin, Cheyenne East, Cheyenne South, Cheyenne Central, Sheridan.
4A West: Kelly Walsh, Natrona, Rock Springs, Laramie, Evanston, Green River.
(Alternatively, a quadrant system of Gillette, Thunder Basin and Sheridan in the Northeast, Cheyenne schools in the Southeast, Casper schools and Laramie in the “Central” and Rock Springs, Green River and Evanston in the Southwest.)
Largest school: Kelly Walsh (ADM 1893). Smallest: Green River (ADM 873).

3A East: Riverton, Douglas, Lander, Rawlins, Torrington, Buffalo.
3A West: Jackson, Star Valley, Cody, Powell, Worland, Pinedale.
(Alternatively, a quadrant system of Riverton, Lander and Rawlins in the “Central,” Douglas, Torrington and Buffalo in the “East,” Cody, Powell and Worland in the Northwest and Star Valley, Jackson and Pinedale in the Southwest.)
Largest school: Jackson (ADM 742). Smallest: Pinedale (ADM 299).

2A Northeast: Newcastle, Moorcroft, Big Horn, Tongue River, Wright, Sundance.
2A Southeast: Wheatland, Glenrock, Burns, Pine Bluffs, Southeast, Lusk.
2A Northwest: Thermopolis, Lovell, Greybull, Rocky Mountain, Shoshoni, Riverside.
2A Southwest: Mountain View, Lyman, Big Piney, Kemmerer, Wyoming Indian, Wind River.
Largest school: Wheatland (ADM 272). Smallest: Riverside (ADM 90).

1A Northeast: Upton, NSI, Midwest, Hulett, Kaycee, Arvada-Clearmont.
1A Southeast: Lingle, Guernsey, Hanna, Rock River, Glendo, Chugwater.
1A Northwest: Burlington, Dubois, St. Stephens, Meeteetse, Ten Sleep.
1A Southwest: Saratoga, Cokeville, Snake River, Farson, Encampment.
Largest school: Upton (ADM 87).

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For football
4A and 3A: Same as other sports.

2A-Division 1 East: Wheatland, Newcastle, Thermopolis, Moorcroft, Glenrock, Burns.
2A-Division 1 West: Mountain View, Lyman, Lovell, Big Piney, Kemmerer, Greybull.
Largest school: Wheatland (ADM 272). Smallest: Greybull (ADM 176).

2A-Division 2 East: Big Horn, Tongue River, Wright, Sundance (Upton-Sundance for football), Pine Bluffs, Southeast, Lusk.
2A-Division 2 West: Wyoming Indian, Rocky Mountain, Wind River, Shoshoni, Riverside, Cokeville (likely opt up), Saratoga (co-op with Encampment forces move up).
Largest school: Big Horn (ADM 159). Smallest: Riverside (ADM 90). (Riverside’s continuation in six-man football if desired is easily accommodated, as is Upton-Sundance, either as a co-op or as two independent programs with Upton in either 11-man or six-man.)

1A Northeast: NSI, Midwest, Hulett, Kaycee.
1A Southeast: Lingle, Guernsey, Hanna, Rock River. (or a combined 1A East)
1A Northwest: Burlington, St. Stephens, Meeteetse, Ten Sleep.
1A Southwest: Dubois, Snake River, Farson. (or a combined 1A West)
Largest football school: Lingle (ADM 83). (All 1A football would be six-man. Technically, both Upton and Saratoga would be classified as six-man schools but would likely compete in 11-man due to existing co-ops, while it’s likely Cokeville, a 1A program, would opt up to 2A for football.)

For all sports except football, four classifications is the right number. How Wyoming arranges those four is the problem.

The 12-16-20-rest setup worked when established in 2001. It doesn’t work as well now.

No solution will fix all the problems. Someone will always be the big school, and someone will always be the small school. I fear a 12-12-24-rest setup may just shift 3A’s competitiveness problems to 2A. However, I do think this tweak will help close the gaps between the biggest and smallest schools in every class except 2A, and I think competitiveness at the 2A level will be evened out by the number of schools in the classification. Both competitiveness and shrinking school size, especially in Class 3A, can be addressed with this change.

For perspective, let’s look at the sport that’s been more or less ignored in this discussion so far: football.

Since 2001, Wyoming’s non-football classification structure has remained the same. Football’s classification structure in that same time period, meanwhile, has seen at least one change with every single reclassification cycle, with the notable exception of the transition from 2015 to 2016.

It’s absurd to think that football’s classification system deserves biannual tinkering and the system used for the rest of the state’s sports does not.

Fortunately, I think, the answer is simple. And one small change could set the course for Wyoming for another decade.

Do you have ideas for changing Wyoming’s high school sports classifications? Post a comment and share your designs!

–patrick

Get caught up. Read part 1.

Competitiveness is a concern in Wyoming’s Class 3A more than any other classification.

Consistently, the smallest schools in Class 3A have little to no hope of competing for state championships. In fact, schools ranked in spots 25 through 28 in enrollment in the past five-plus years haven’t won a single state championship in any sport except football (which uses five classes).

Mountain View, Newcastle, Thermopolis, Lyman, Glenrock and Lovell — the six schools that have alternately occupied the bottom four spots in the 16-school Class 3A since the 2010-11 school year — have won a combined zero state titles at the 3A level in that span.

However, 3A’s four largest schools (Jackson, Star Valley, Cody and Douglas) have won 45 3A titles in those five-and-a-half years. And that doesn’t even count football titles or Jackson’s numerous all-class championships in alpine and Nordic skiing.

The only class that measures up similarly is 1A, where the bottom quarter of schools have also been held without a non-football state title since 2010-11. However, some of those schools, like Glendo and Chugwater, are so small that they don’t field varsity programs for many sports.

The bottom quarter of schools in 4A and 2A have won 6.1 percent and 7.7 percent, respectively, of those classifications’ state non-football championships in that same span. Those numbers are well above 3A’s 0.0 percent.

Bottom 25 percent in 3A: 0 non-football titles
Bottom 25 percent in 4A: 6 non-football titles (6.1 percent) (not counting 3A schools like Jackson that have won all-class titles in sports like Nordic or alpine skiing).
Bottom 25 percent in 2A: 4 non-football titles (7.7 percent)
Bottom 25 percent in 1A: 0 non-football titles

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The struggles for competitiveness in 3A go beyond just the bottom four schools.

The eight smallest schools, or the schools in the bottom half, of 3A have won just 11 of the 76 non-football 3A titles awarded since the 2010-11 school year. That means the bottom half of schools in the 3A class have won just 14.4 percent of the 3A state titles — the lowest percentage of any of Wyoming’s four classifications.

Comparatively, in other classifications, those figures are much higher.

In 4A, the bottom half of schools in enrollment have won 31.6 percent of the non-football titles (again not counting 3A schools like Jackson that have won all-class titles in sports like Nordic skiing or alpine skiing — which, if included, would make that percentage even higher).

In 2A, the bottom half of schools in enrollment have won 21.2 percent of non-football titles.

In 1A, the bottom half of schools in enrollment have won 33.3 percent of non-football titles (Snake River, which is at the midpoint of the 1A rankings, was placed in the bottom half to account for schools like Chugwater and Glendo that don’t consistently field varsity programs for many sports.)

Clearly, in 3A, the smallest schools in the classification have the toughest time winning state championships, and 3A’s rates are significantly worse than other classifications.

Something is wrong.

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The 3A struggles are more pronounced in some sports than others. In four of the 14 sports offered at the 3A level (excluding football), the eight smallest schools have been shut out of  state championships for more than a decade. For example, the last bottom-half team to win the boys track and field title was Torrington in 2002; the last bottom-half team to win the girls swimming title was Newcastle in 2002; the last bottom-half team to win the boys swimming title was Lyman in 1990. A team in the bottom half of 3A has never won a girls cross country title.

Class 4A, conversely, doesn’t have that problem. The longest bottom-half drought in the 22 4A (or one-class) sports is in boys track and field, which hasn’t been one by a bottom-half team since Laramie in 1996; girls swimming hasn’t had a bottom-half winner since Laramie in 2001; wrestling hasn’t had a bottom-half winner (or any winner but Gillette) since Green River in 2002. However, 17 of 4A’s 22 sports have had at least one bottom-half winner since 2010.

And in 2A and 1A, the biggest gaps are in 2A girls basketball (no bottom-half champions since Lusk in 1999), 1A boys track (no bottom-half champs since Farson in 1998) and 1A girls track (no bottom-half champs since Albin in 2003). They are the only three of the 15 sports offered at the 2A and 1A levels haven’t had at least one bottom-half champion since 2006.

Football, too, has no such problems. In fact, in the past six seasons, schools in the bottom half of their classifications in enrollment have won 13 of the 30 titles (43 percent) — twice in 4A (Sheridan), three times in 3A (Powell), once at 2A (Big Horn), five times at 1A 11-man (Cokeville and Southeast) and twice in 1A six-man (Kaycee and Meeteetse).

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But competitiveness isn’t just about championships. Right now, those bottom quarter of schools in 3A are struggling just to keep up. Just look at the 2014-15 school year’s culminating events to see how the bottom four schools in Class 3A in terms of enrollment (Newcastle, Mountain View, Glenrock and Lovell) fared at the state level. It wasn’t pretty.

The best finish was the Mountain View girls’ second-place finish in volleyball and the Lovell girls’ second-place finish in girls basketball. Mountain View’s girls also finished third in girls basketball and sixth in boys cross country; Lovell’s boys finished fifth in track and field; and Newcastle’s girls finished sixth in girls swimming. No other teams in the bottom quarter of 3A finished higher than sixth. For golf, soccer and swimming, at least three of the four schools didn’t even field teams in those sports.

So far in 2015-16, the highest finish for a bottom-four school in 3A is Mountain View’s second-place finish in volleyball. No other bottom-four team has finished higher than fifth at state so far this year in any other sport.

The problem of 3A isn’t a problem tied to the competitiveness of the individual schools, either. Schools at the bottom of 3A have proven they know how to win when given the chance in 2A. The six schools alternately holding down the bottom four spots in 3A the past five and a half years (Glenrock, Lovell, Thermopolis, Lyman, Mountain View and Newcastle) have combined to win 14 state championships at the 2A level since the 2010-11 school year. (And Glenrock and Newcastle have both been 3A all that time.)

And therein might be the key to a solution.

Part 3, tomorrow: A potential solution to the biggest problem in Wyoming’s high school sports’ classification system.

–patrick

The last major change to Wyoming’s high school classification system came in 2001.

In the past 15 years, the system hasn’t changed. The schools have.

Wyoming’s high schools — and, by proxy, the Wyoming High School Activities Association — have struggled to devise a classification system that works for all schools for all sports except football. The problems show up most significantly in Class 3A, particularly those in the bottom quarter of the 16-team classification.

Not only are the schools at the bottom of Class 3A smaller, they’re also less competitive than they were 15 years ago. However, a small tweak to the state’s existing classification system could help solve the problem that’s dogged the bottom of 3A, and therefore the entire system, for the past several years.

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In Wyoming high school sports, no school has it more difficult than school No. 28.

When the Wyoming High School Activities Association sets its classifications every two years, school No. 28 of Wyoming’s 71 athletics-sponsoring high schools is in a difficult spot — the smallest school in Class 3A.

Consistently, the same schools end up in the 28th spot: Mountain View, Thermopolis, Lovell, Glenrock and Lyman. And Mountain View, Thermopolis, Lovell and Kemmerer have all recently been school 29 — the biggest in Class 2A.

In 2001, when the WHSAA went from enrollment-based cutoffs (e.g., smaller than 104 students was 1A, and so on) to a set number of schools per classification (the 12 largest in 4A, the next 16 largest in 3A, the next 20 largest in 2A, the rest in 1A), the splits worked pretty well. The smallest 3A school, school 28, floated at about 300 students; the largest 2A school was about 250 students, or maybe a bit smaller. However, that cutoff has changed dramatically. For the next reclassification cycle, set to start in the fall of 2016, school 28 will be Lyman at 210 students. In 1998, the school ranked 28th — the cutoff between 3A and 2A — had 288 students.

The problem, though, isn’t that the smallest 3A schools are shrinking. It’s that the biggest schools in 3A aren’t shrinking as fast.

In the past 15 years, the largest discrepancy to crop up is the one between the largest and smallest schools in Class 3A. Almost all schools near the 3A/2A cutoff line 15 years ago — Kemmerer, Glenrock, Mountain View, Lyman, Lovell, Thermopolis, Newcastle, Wheatland — have all gotten smaller. The ones that have grown only grew by minuscule amounts. (The exception is Pinedale, where natural gas development prompted a huge influx of students.) The schools at the top of 3A are smaller, too… but their rate of loss is not nearly like that of those schools near the bottom of the classification.

And while the most recent reclassification cycle has Glenrock, Kemmerer and Lovell in 2A, the other four small schools hovering near the 2A/3A cutoff (Newcastle, Wheatland, Lyman and Thermopolis) are still in 3A despite having lost significant numbers of students.

This is almost exclusively a 3A problem. For 4A, 2A and 1A, the 12-16-20-rest setup continues to work. For example, the gap between the largest 2A school and the smallest 2A school has remained fairly static: In 2005, the smallest 2A school had 97 students; entering 2016, it will be at 87.

Here’s a quick glance at the school ranked 13th (largest 3A using current classification rules), schools 24-28 (the bottom five in 3A) and 29-32 (the largest three in 2A) over the years:

1976
13. Powell, 645
…
24. Wheatland, 322
25. Lovell, 266
26. Kemmerer, 262
27. Greybull, 227
28. Glenrock, 217
——-
29. Lusk, 203
30. St. Mary’s, 190
31. Sundance, 181
32. Pinedale, 178

1981
13. Cody, 718
…
24. Glenrock, 330
25. Thermopolis, 316
26. Lovell, 247
27. Kemmerer, 233
28. Greybull, 214
——-
29. Lyman, 197
30. Pinedale, 192
31. Hanna, 192
32. Sundance, 192

1985
13. Cody, 693
…
24. Glenrock, 321
25. Thermopolis, 304
26. Kemmerer, 248
27. Lyman, 237
28. Mountain View, 236
——-
29. Lovell, 228
30. Greybull, 192
31. Wind River, 187
32. Pinedale, 185

1998
13. Lander, 787
…
24. Kemmerer, 331
25. Lyman, 316
26. Mountain View, 309
27. Glenrock, 306
28. Thermopolis, 288
——-
29. Lovell, 254
30. Wyoming Indian, 240
31. Big Piney, 218
32. Wright, 200

2005
13. Jackson, 743
…
24. Glenrock, 257
25. Kemmerer, 244
26. Pinedale, 221
27. Thermopolis, 216
28. Mountain View, 213
——-
29. Lovell, 209
30. Lyman, 200
31. Big Piney, 192
32. Greybull, 168

2007
13. Cody, 695
…
24. Glenrock, 253
25. Pinedale, 249
26. Kemmerer, 210
27. Lyman, 208
28. Lovell, 204
——-
29. Mountain View, 196
30. Thermopolis, 189
31. Big Piney, 179
32. Wright, 173

2009
13. Cody, 671
…
24. Newcastle, 260
25. Glenrock, 223
26. Lyman, 218
27. Mountain View, 213
28. Thermopolis, 204
——-
29. Kemmerer, 199
30. Lovell, 199
31. Big Piney, 187
32. Burns, 181

2011
13. Star Valley, 734
…
24. Wheatland, 286
25. Newcastle, 248
26. Mountain View, 226
27. Lyman, 225
28. Glenrock, 219
——-
29. Lovell, 214
30. Big Piney, 203
31. Thermopolis, 201
32. Kemmerer and Burns, 183

2014
13. Star Valley, 717
…
24. Wheatland, 298
25. Newcastle, 237
26. Mountain View, 222
27. Glenrock, 222
28. Lovell, 215
——-
29. Thermopolis, 210
30. Lyman, 204
31. Big Piney, 198
32. Kemmerer, 177

2016
13. Riverton, 742
…
24. Wheatland, 272
25. Mountain View, 236
26. Newcastle, 224
27. Thermopolis, 215
28. Lyman, 210
——-
29. Lovell, 204
30. Moorcroft, 193
31. Big Piney, 192
32. Glenrock, 191

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As noted, the problem is not just the schools’ ranking — it’s also their size relative to other 3A schools.

This wouldn’t be a problem if competitiveness had stayed consistent even as the enrollments have changed. Over the past five years, though, we’ve seen a definitive shift in 3A’s competitiveness.

In short, no size means no chance. For 3A, the 12-16-20-rest classification splits have been a competitive death sentence for schools at the bottom.

Part 2, tomorrow: How small 3A schools’ decreasing enrollments has diminished those schools’ ability to stay competitive.

–patrick