NIAA to make recommendations at realignment meeting

The NIAA realignment committee is expected to make recommendations for fall sports when it meets at 9 a.m. Friday at Chaparral High School.

The recommendations will be sent to the NIAA Board of Control for a vote in January.

“After a year and a half of work, we’re hopefully getting close to finishing it up,” NIAA executive director Bart Thompson said. “The initial proposal is out and on our website. We’re just fine-tuning at this point and giving the schools the chance to appeal where they were placed. After that, we’ll start to work on the tournament formats.”

The biggest changes in this realignment cycle will be the addition of a classification and alignments being made on a sport-by-sport basis. In the past, each sport other than football fell under a single alignment.

The proposed football alignment creates a 20-team Class 5A, which will consist of 11 schools from the South and nine from the North. Class 4A will have 17 teams, all from the South.

Class 1A and 2A are decided by enrollment, while placement in 3A to 5A is decided based on a rubric of a school’s performance in recent years.

“We think that’s a great step forward,” Thompson said. “We’ve taken the biggest classification and made it two, and we’ve learned enrollment isn’t as reliable of an indicator of how a team will perform as in the past, so the rubric allows teams to be placed where they can be more competitive.”

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Contact Jason Orts at jorts@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2936. Follow @SportsWithOrts on Twitter.