Next year, Valley won’t be in largest division
Board appears set to make plenty of changes
Thursday’s New Mexico Activities Association’s board of directors meeting will lay out the alignment and classification for its member schools for the next two-year block.
And while the exact recommendation to the board from the NMAA staff remains guarded until the board meeting begins at 10 a.m., there figures to be a good deal of change — perhaps even drastic change — in store.
One of the most glaring alterations pertains to Valley High School — a decision Valley made itself.
Valley, which petitioned the NMAA to play up into the largest classification for the last two, two-year blocks, will not petition to do so for the next two school years, the Journal has learned.
For 2018-19 and 2019-20 — with the exception of football, which keeps a Class 6A — the state is going back to a system where Class 5A is the largest division.
Valley will compete across the board in Class 4A, which is on par with enrollment figures that put the school several hundred students short of the cutoff to be a 5A school.
“We’re gonna play to our numbers,” Valley athletic director Joe Coleman said. The Vikings will play 5A in football.
Valley will only be middle of the pack in terms of enrollment even for a 4A school, let alone the 5A level.
“It really becomes a numbers game for us,” he said. “We have some really good athletes, but playing (up), they get overshadowed a little bit.”
Coleman said he hopes Valley’s enrollment numbers will rebound, and that this move won’t have to be permanent.
“I’m a competitive guy, and our program is built on competition, and I had a real hard time with it,” he said. “But after talking to people and visiting with people … I had to be convinced that this will be a positive move. We’ll do it for two years and see what happens.”
Going up
NMAA executive director Sally Marquez declined to say how the districts will be arranged ahead of Thursday’s meeting. The Journal has spoken with several ADs, however, and if their projections are correct, there are massive changes afoot.
But Marquez was able to parcel out the names of schools that have an enrollment that places them in 5A the next two school years.
Capital, Farmington, Deming, Alamogordo and Roswell all will be 5A members in 2018-19, Marquez said. That does not necessarily mean all of them will be in the largest football class.
Highland said it is “80 percent sure we’ll play where our attendance places us,” AD John Barnhill said. That would be at the 4A level in all sports except football, which would be 5A.
With football using separate enrollment numbers from the rest of the sports, there are going to be plenty of differences in how districts are constructed.
Notes
One of the other new wrinkles relates to Hope Christian, which will be in the 4A division. That puts the Huskies — and that vaunted boys basketball program — in with plenty of new schools. Hope currently is in the third-largest class (4A), but starting next basketball season, 4A will be the second-largest class.
… Schools that want to appeal their placement have 72 hours to file with the NMAA, which will hear the appeals Dec. 7.
… Albuquerque Academy has decided to go back to independent status in football, while Santa Fe, which has been independent, is moving back into a district, Marquez said.