KSHSAA releases 2018-19 classifications

By Andy Brown
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Updated: September 26, 2018

The Kansas High School Activities Association released the classifications for the 2018-19 season Wednesday for all activities other than football, and there were some major changes that involved Frontier League programs.

Both Spring Hill and Bonner Springs made the jump from Class 4A to 5A in the latest numbers as Spring Hill featured an enrollment of 779 and Bonner Springs is the second smallest school in 5A with an enrollment of 750.

The rest of the Frontier League schools, including Louisburg, will all remain in Class 4A. Louisburg recorded an enrollment number of 530, which put them close to the middle.

Frontier League school Ottawa and Bishop Miege are both the largest 4A schools with an enrollment of 679. The lowest 5A school is Andover Central at 748.

KSHSAA voted to make changes to the classification system last year.

For football, the two 4A divisions and Class 2-1A have been eliminated. They have been replaced with 32 team classifications in 4A, 5A and 6A, while 3A and 2A will have 48-team classifications. The remaining schools will play in 1A.

The second proposal was for all other sports. Other than football, classes 4A, 5A and 6A will have 36 teams in each division. Classes 3A and 2A will have 64 schools each, while the remaining schools will be in 1A.

The football proposal passed with a vote of 215-73 and the all-sports proposal passed with a 207-145 majority. All of the classes, except 6A and 1A, were in favor.

With those new proposals comes a different playoff system for many of the sports.

Postseasons for wrestling, track, soccer, cross country and golf will remain the same. However, the classifications will not be the same for wrestling. There will be 36 teams in Class 6 and 5A and then 40 percent of the next biggest programs will be classified in Class 4A, which is approximately 60 schools.

Louisburg will see postseason changes in five sports programs – football, basketball, baseball, softball and volleyball.

In football, Louisburg will no longer have district play as the playoffs will begin in week nine. Class 4A will play an eight-game regular season and then each side of the state will be seeded in a bracket from 1 through 16, based on their record.

Given the fact the Frontier League currently has nine teams after recently adding three schools in Tonganoxie, Bonner Springs and Piper, the Wildcats will no longer have to play a non-league opponent. De Soto recently chose to leave the Frontier League following the 2017-18 season to join a new league made up of 5A schools.

Another change will be in basketball. For the postseason, there will no longer be substates, instead the 18 teams on each side of the state will be bracketed out by record beginning with two play-in games.

From there, the bracket will be sized down to four-team pods, with the higher seed hosting the game. Teams will have to win two games to reach the state tournaments. Pods will be 1-16-8-9 seeds, 4-13-5-12, 2-15-7-10 and 3-14-6-11. The eight pod winners will advance to the state tournament.

Baseball and softball will be similar as there will no longer be regionals. Like basketball, there will be two play-in games with the same pod structure. The top four overall seeds will each host all games in their pod on the same day.

In volleyball, there will be four substates across the state, broken into eight brackets. There will also be nine teams in each substate, which will require a play-in game. Teams will need to win two games to qualify for state.