OHSAA Board of Directors Approves Expansion Proposal

Thursday, February 15, 2024 at 10:50 AM

Soccer, girls volleyball, basketball, baseball and softball adding divisions starting in 2024-25.

(Columbus, Oh.) – After months of discussion and meetings around Ohio to gather feedback, the Ohio High School Athletic Association Board of Directors unanimously approved a division expansion proposal on Thursday morning.

The change affects OHSAA General Sports Regulation 17 and will result in girls and boys soccer now having five divisions, while girls volleyball, girls and boys basketball, softball, and baseball will all have seven divisions.

In the sports with seven divisions, the largest 64 schools will be placed in Division I and the next largest 64 schools will go into Division II. The remaining schools will be divided as evenly as possible into the remaining five divisions.

The OHSAA already does something similar to this in football, in which the largest 10 percent of schools are placed in Division I and the remaining schools are divided evenly in Divisions II through VII.

The new divisions will go into effect in the fall of 2024.

Each year, the Board of Directors will have final authority in determining how many divisions will be used that school year, but the proposal calls for the following scale to be used to guide the board’s decision for girls volleyball, football, soccer, basketball, softball and baseball.

199 or fewer teams: 1 Division
200 to 299 teams: 2 Divisions
300 to 399 teams: 3 Divisions
400 to 499 teams: 4 Divisions
500 to 599 teams: 5 Divisions
600 to 699 teams: 6 Divisions
700 and more teams: 7 Divisions

Doug Ute, OHSAA Executive Director, praised the board’s decision as a step toward to level the playing field of OHSAA tournaments.

“It’s the right thing to do for the student-athletes who have been competing at this disadvantage,” said Ute. “For too long, the largest schools in our divisions have been so much larger than the smaller schools in the same division, which has resulted in many schools accepting that they realistically have little chance at making a run in the tournament. In some of our sports, there have been more than 200 schools competing for a state title in that division, which is significantly more than what most other states do, and what we do in many of our own sports.

“We know that there is a lot of work to do in the coming months to prepare for additional divisions this fall,” Ute said. “We have already started working on the details to accomplish this, but one thing we know for sure is that having two or three more state champions in these sports doesn’t water them down or diminish winning a state title. And we anticipate that this new format will be revenue neutral, since every school makes the tournament already.”

The OHSAA will announce structural and dates changes for future state tournaments at a later date.

Learn more at https://www.ohsaa.org/news-media/articles/ohsaa-board-of-directors-approves-expansion-proposal.