New look for NM preps
You’ll find changes galore as football openers approach
Realignment significantly alters football landscape
The pieces, from one corner of New Mexico to the other, have been re-arranged by what might best be described as an administrative tornado.
Today, we shall attempt to put those pieces back together in as coherent manner as possible.
Realignment has been one of the hot-button topics in high school athletics, and with the 2018 prep football season fast approaching, let us examine how the new picture puzzle looks. Among the 119 football-playing schools in the state, dozens felt the impact of realignment to some degree.
It is necessary to understand that what follows applies only to football. The chart of New Mexico football-playing schools accompanies this story, with their classifications and their district alignments for the 2018 and 2019 seasons.
Class 6A
First, remember that football is now the only sport that will continue to have a Class 6A. In the other sports, 5A will be the largest classification. Football will have seven
classes: 6A-2A, 8-Man and 6-Man.
There are a handful of new wrinkles to be found here, and the most important one is that 6A has shriveled from 23 teams to 18, meaning that two-thirds of the 6A programs (12) will qualify for this year’s playoffs. That is up from just over 50 percent (12 of 23) last season.
Where have the other five gone? Two — Rio Grande and Albuquerque — chose to compete as independents for the next two seasons. Three others — Piedra Vista, Highland and Valley — are 5A schools. Santa Fe was 6A in 2016, then went independent last year.
Class 6A also now has only three districts. The old District 4 with six Albuquerque schools was dissolved.
The remaining two members of that league, Atrisco Heritage and West Mesa — which both qualified for the playoffs a year ago — were shifted to 1-6A where they join Rio Rancho, Cleveland, Volcano Vista and Cibola.
The lack of a fourth district has created a bonus for all 6A programs. With only three automatic playoff bids available now instead of four, there are nine at-large bids up for grabs in November, rather than eight.
District 2 (actually 2/5), which is the Northeast Heights schools and Clovis, is identical to what it was last seasons. This district lost Santa Fe after the 2016 season. AHS and Rio Grande were supposed to enter it starting this fall.
District 3 is also identical to what it was, with the four Las Cruces schools plus Gadsden, Carlsbad and Hobbs. It is officially designated District 3/4, if only to represent that there are schools from two regions in that league. (Do yourself a favor and don’t get caught up in the 2/5 and 3/4 designations, or any districts that are listed that way in any classification. It’ll only bog you down. They are largely meaningless.)
Class 5A
Except for the bizarre exception of Silver, most of the rest of the newly configured 5A is rather straightforward.
Highland and Valley both were placed into highly competitive districts, arguably even more rugged than the 6A district (4-6A) they just vacated. The Hornets are grouped with Piedra Vista, Farmington and Miyamura.
The Vikings’ district partners are Belen, Los Lunas and Valencia.
With Albuquerque Academy, formerly of 2-5A, also returning to independent status for 2018 and 2019, District 2-5A features Del Norte, Los Alamos, Capital and newcomer Santa Fe.
Alamogordo last year was grouped with Deming, Santa Teresa and Chaparral. Not anymore. The Tigers’ new league, which is more demanding, includes Artesia, Roswell and Goddard.
Deming, Santa Teresa and Chaparral have a new fourth: Silver. And the predicament of the Colts is one of the most extreme examples on record of New Mexico’s sprawling geography as it pertains to realignment.
Silver will be competing with three 5A schools in a district, but the Colts are a Class 4A program, and if they qualify for state, it will be in the 4A bracket.
The problem is simple. There are no other 4A schools anywhere near Silver City. The closest one is Ruidoso, which is 235 miles to the east. Gallup to the north is 255 miles away.
So the New Mexico Activities Association took the unusual and dramatic step of placing Silver into a 5A district. And even if the Colts win that new district (3-5A), they still can only qualify for state in the 4A bracket.
Class 4A
There were plenty of schools that fell from 5A to 4A: St. Pius, Grants, Lovington, Aztec, Bloomfield, Gallup, Española Valley and Kirtland Central among them.
The Sartans and Grants once belonged to District 5-5A. Those two schools, along with Bernalillo, Taos, Pojoaque and Española Valley, are the current members of District 2/5-4A.
Bloomfield, Aztec, Gallup and Kirtland Central all used to be in District 1-5A. Now those four are the teams in District 1-4A.
Other notes
Hope Christian has fallen from 4A to 3A, and the Huskies’ new district (Cuba, Laguna-Acoma, Navajo Prep) is night and day from their old one, a brutal collection of teams that included Moriarty, N.M. Military, Ruidoso and Portales. NMMI also has dropped to 3A.
Other independents are Shiprock, Navajo Pine and the New Mexico School For the Deaf.
The new realignment certainly solved one of the NMAA’s most intrusive and longtime headaches, as there are 19 schools competing in Class 2A, including Albuquerque’s Mission Achievement & Success, which has district games for the first time this year.
Last year, there were six schools in the 2A division.
All of the classes except 6-Man will have 12-team playoff fields, so 36 of the 52 schools (or 69.2 percent) that compete in Classes 6A, 5A and 4A will earn at least one playoff game.
The 6-Man bracket will have six qualifiers. It won’t include Reserve, last year’s state runner-up, which has dropped football, at least for this year.