OHSAA expanding divisions for 7 sports in 2024-25

COLUMBUS — The Ohio High School Athletic Association will crown 19 more team state champions next school year.The organization, the state's governing body for high school sports, announced in a press release Thursday that the OHSAA Board of Directors unanimously approved a proposal earlier in the day to increase the number of divisions offered for postseason tournaments for seven high school team sports.Girls and boys soccer will each increase from three to five divisions, while girls volleyball, girls basketball, boys basketball, softball and baseball will all increase from four to seven divisions.The new divisions go into effect this fall with the start of the 2024-25 school year.Under the new format for each sport, the largest 64 schools will compete in Division I and the next 64 largest schools will compete in Division II, with the rest of the schools distributed between the remaining divisions as evenly as possible.The OHSAA already uses a similar format for football, where the largest 10% of the schools compete in Division I, with the remainder distributed among Division II through Division VII.OHSAA Executive Director Doug Ute 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," Ute said. "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," he 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.