Is NCHSAA expansion to eight high school classifications good? Depends on who you ask

Friday night, the N.C. High School Athletic Association administered the first of four state championship football games. Beginning with the 2025-26 school year, there will be twice as many.

Lake Norman Charter principal Craig Smith thinks that is a good thing.

Smith was part of an NCHSAA task force that examined how the association should expand, if at all, as its membership increases. Next year, the NCHSAA projects to grow to at least 440 schools.

State legislators have told the NCHSAA to make each class no bigger than 64 schools. With eight classes, Smith said the NCHSAA could have around 55 teams per class, with schools being slotted into classes strictly based on enrollment figures.

“The driving factor with the eight classifications is allowing continuous growth in the membership,” Smith said. “With seven (classes), while it could have been done, it would have left very little room for growth. But eight allows for schools potentially changing sizes dramatically, with new schools being built or lines being changed. Being able to have a buffer was widely supported by the entire task force.”

Having eight classifications is likely going to mean more split conferences, where a 5A team might be in a league with 6A or 7A schools.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools athletic director Ericia Turner, another task force member, said she didn’t think all CMS schools would be in the largest classification, as most currently are. She said she expected most CMS schools to be between 6A and 8A.

Smith said the task force will continue to meet and make recommendations to a realignment committee that will ultimately handle the task of placing schools into conferences. He admitted that doing so will be difficult.

“I think priority will be given to geography,” he said. “One of the exercises we did last month was we got a huge Google Earth map and the NCHSAA office dropped pins on where schools were located. You quickly get to see some of the challenges that mountain and coastal schools face when it comes to conferences, of finding schools of similar size, finding reasonable travel distances. It was very enlightening and eye-opening for me.”

Smith feels with more classifications, though, the effect of having split conferences won’t be as dramatic because the difference in the size of the schools won’t be as large as it could be currently.

For example, Olympic, which has 1,609 students, plays in the same conference as Myers Park, which has 3,557.

“This is a completely new venture for everyone involved in high school athletics in North Carolina,” Smith said. “Everything is on the table.”

Crowning eight state champs has been done before

From 2001-2021, the NCHSAA subdivided its football classifications. The 1A class began in 2001, and the other three began the following year. Ultimately, the association split each of its four classes into two, awarding eight state football champions.

NCHSAA commissioner Que Tucker has often said coaches from other sports wanted a similar state championship offering, and in announcing the additional classes last week, Tucker said, “This is a direction (the member schools) have been wanting to go for years.”

Pine Lake Prep football coach Austin Trotter thinks the move to eight will only help the NCHSAA.

“This puts us in line with Tennessee and Georgia,” he said. “They have one state champion per every 50-something schools. South Carolina is at, like, 34. Right now, we’re one state championship for every 110 schools.”

Trotter said moving to eight affords more student-athletes more opportunities.

“People say it waters it down,” Trotter said of adding more classes, “but now kids get on these playoff runs and they get more (college) looks, more recognition, more accolades. That’s a good thing.”

Trotter argues that in the lower classifications, more classes will level the playing field — even more than in the larger classes — and not force schools to regularly face opponents that are twice their size, or more.

“And from what I’m hearing, we may have smaller conferences as well,” he said. “It allows you to keep the same five teams in a conference and create longer lasting rivalries, while also allowing you to play more teams outside of your conference. Let’s face it, scheduling when you have seven, eight teams in your conference is hard.”

Should charters have a separate bracket?

Right now, there are no multiplier rules for non-boarding parochial schools and charters in the NCHSAA. The S.C. High School League recently adopted a multiplier that will count every out-of-district student at a private or charter school as three students, thus boosting enrollment for sports purposes.

That means that most charter schools will play up at least one class in South Carolina.

The rule was created because many coaches and administrators in the state felt that charters and privates had an unfair advantage because of the larger geographic borders from which they can draw students.

In North Carolina, without such a rule, Trotter thinks charters schools, like his, could have their own playoff bracket, while remaining in their new conferences.

“There’s only 14 charters that play football,” he said. “Other sports have a greater turnout, but I think that’s a simple solution.”

Some are not in favor of more change

Longtime Myers Park girls basketball coach Barbara Nelson has won two NCHSAA state championships, and seven more at Providence Day in a private school league.

She said when the new conference and playoff changes hit in 2025, it will be the third major change for CMS conferences.

“And I’ve only been here 12 years,” she said. “We had great rivalries in the Southwestern 4A conference, and then we had to go to three conferences and we got moved out and it broke up some of our rivalries, and just as we establish new ones, you could break us up again. I don’t like that. Rivalry games are great for students, gates, attendance. I don’t like losing rivalries you have built over a long period of time.”

Nelson said she’s also not a fan of conferences with teams from different classifications in them.

“I don’t like a 3A/4A conference, and you’re not playing on the same level,” she said, “and all of a sudden two 4A teams in a 3A/4A conference both get to go to the playoffs simply because they’re the only two 4A teams in a conference? That’s not fair. I like conference teams to play on the same level, even if it means more travel. We can be more careful to make sure longer travel is on Fridays.”

Nelson also wonders how many teams will make the playoffs when the new changes begin. Does everybody get in? Is it 32 teams? Forty-eight?

“I mean, how do you do all that?” she said. “I’m such a traditionalist and I like consistency in what we’re doing, so I’m just at the wait-and-see mark with all of this. I want to see what we’re doing.”

Answers will take time

Smith, the Lake Norman Charter principal, said answers to those types of questions — conference structure, playoff formats — will come once the realignment committee forms and begins to do its work.

But, he maintained, going to eight classifications and eight state champions is without question the right thing to do.

“More than 80 percent of the membership approved expanding classifications,” he said. “I don’t think there was ever a magic number folks had their eyes set on, but I think having schools competing and not having as drastic a size difference for state championships is a good thing. A lot of attention goes to football and basketball, but this is something every sport is impacted by.

“I just think schools competing against schools that are the same size is a good thing.”