AUGUSTA, Maine — The classification committee of the Maine Principals’ Association did some minor tinkering Tuesday to a proposal that could expand the state’s high school basketball ranks from four to five classes next season.
Perhaps the most significant move endorsed by the committee involved identification.
The panel of school and athletic administrators voted to support changing the geographic designations in all sports sponsored by the MPA from Eastern Maine and Western Maine to North and South to better reflect how the regional landscape is divided.
For the five-class format, the classification committee supported naming a newly formed single division of the state’s largest basketball-playing schools Class AA, followed by Classes A, B, C, D.
All recommendations are subject to a final vote by the MPA full membership at its annual spring conference on April 30.
Gerry Durgin, MPA assistant executive director and liaison to the classification committee, presented the panel with the two letters it received from schools regarding the five-class basketball proposal since the plan was last updated Jan. 14.
The committee made one slight change to the enrollment cutoffs, adding 10 students to the Class D upper limit to make it between 0 and 130 students while cutting 10 students from the lower limit for Class C to make that division for schools with between 131 and 324 students.
That recommendation would drop Washburn and Central Aroostook of Mars Hill from Class C North to Class D North, leaving the proposed Class C North with 18 schools and Class D South with 16 schools.
That change would have no impact on Class C or Class D South. The smallest Class D South school is Valley of Bingham with 71 students. The next largest South school, Richmond, had 142 students as of the April 1, 2014, cutoff date used for the next two-year reclassification cycle and would remain in Class C South.
That tweak was another step toward creating numerical balance among classes in each region as well as between the respective class in the North and South, said committee chair Bunky Dow, activities director at Mount Desert Island High School in Bar Harbor.
Under the updated proposal, Class AA would have 16 boys teams and 17 girls programs. Class A would have 14 in the North and 13 in the South, Class B would involve 17 programs in the North and 13 in the South, Class C would have 18 in the North and 20 in the South, and Class D would have 16 in the North and 12 in the South.
The updated five-class enrollment cutoffs have Class AA schools with 824-plus students, 545-823 for Class A, 325-544 for Class B, 131-324 for Class D and 0-130 for Class D.
An additional element of the five-class proposal previously supported by the classification committee would reduce the numerical differentials between classes used to calculate Heal points in basketball from five points per class to two points with the goal of encouraging more crossover games between schools.
Under the classification committee’s plan, victories over Class AA teams would be worth 40 points, compared with 38 for Class A wins, 36 for Class B, 34 for Class C and 32 for Class D, the smallest school division.
The five-class proposal, which has been under consideration for more than a year, has been prompted in great part by declining student enrollments and the southward migration of the state’s population.
Those factors have combined to swell the number of smaller schools in northern and eastern Maine while concentrating most of a dwindling number of large schools in the southern counties.
Seventy percent of the MPA’s 152 member high schools have an enrollment of fewer than 500 students.
The classification committee will meet March 10 to complete its work reclassifying all sports before sending its recommendations to the MPA’s Interscholastic Management Committee, which is scheduled to meet March 12.
At least three sport-specific committees, skiing, football and field hockey, have work remaining to be completed and sent on to the classification committee before that meeting.
The ski committee is mulling reducing its ranks from three to two classes beginning next year after only two full teams competed in the recent Class C state meet.
The field hockey panel is fine-tuning its enrollment cutoffs, while the football committee is making provisions for the coming season based on whether a recent proposal by the IMC to reduce the number of years a school that petitions up in class must remain there gains final approval.
Currently, a school that petitions up a class for competitive reasons must stay in the higher class for four years. However, a proposal already supported by the IMC would reduce that to two years in conjunction with each classification cycle.
Should that change gain final approval by the MPA membership, at least three schools — Biddeford, Wells and Mountain Valley of Rumford — would have the option of dropping back to their designated classes based on enrollment.
