The Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association’s Board of Control could have opted to keep the current classification format at Wednesday’s meeting, but instead voted 5-4 to adopt a new plan for football, baseball, basketball, softball and volleyball.

After hearing the three proposals on the agenda, Board member and Sequatchie County principal Tommy Layne asked TSSAA Executive Director Ronnie Carter which he recommended.

“The nature of where we are right now, taking travel cost and gas prices into consideration, I recommend Plan 2,” Carter said.

Moments later the second proposal was approved. Under the new plan, which will be effective from 2009-2012, there will be three classifications, each made up of 16 districts. For the postseason, football will likely expand to six classes, unless multiple Division I schools opt to move to D-II, which would create a five classification system.

For the playoffs, Class AAA will become 6A and 5A; AA 4A and 3A and A will be 2A and 1A. Each class will have between 55-65 football programs competing, except Class A, which will likely have more than 80. In 3A-6A 32 teams will qualify for the playoffs, while 1A and 2A will have 24 playoff teams.

Teams finishing first or second in the district will be automatic qualifiers, and the rest of the playoff field will be filled by wild cards. All schools will play every team in their district, and by having three classes rather than the current five, travel cost will be cut considerably for most schools.

“The more I looked at it, I didn’t see a lot of choice,” Layne said afterward. “The cost of travel, it just didn’t make sense to keep the regions the way they are now, so spread out. And the other option made even less sense, so this plan definitely seems like it will keep schools in districts with others that are close to them.

“I don’t like the idea of possibly having six state championships in Division I and two more in D-II. That’s too many for a state our size. But keeping travel costs down was a more important issue for most of our schools right now.”

The Board also directed the state office to bring back a plan on how the tournament format would look if the same plan is used for postseason tournaments in basketball, baseball, softball, and volleyball. If the new plan is implemented for each of those sports, there will be six state champions crowned in D-I and two others in D-II for them as well.

“Its already a pretty significant change for football,” Carter said. “The district alignments will be pretty dramatic, but we’ll have to wait until this fall to get the enrollments for all the schools before we determine which class and district each school will be in.

“I’m sure we’ll hear how the football playoffs will be even more watered down with one more championship than we’ve had, but this really was the plan that made the most sense.”

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