We may be only days away from WMass Football Tournament championship weekend, but a number of local football programs, including Division IV-A contender Turners Falls High School, have already been thinking about future postseasons.
The reason? Late last week, the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association Football Committee released the proposed alignments for 2017 through 2020, and Frontier Regional School football coach Don Gordon echoed the feelings of a number of his coaching colleagues when he first saw the new alignments.
“I was a little shocked,” Gordon said, laughing. “I just said, “That’s not right.”
The reason for his shock, and that of both Turners Falls and Pioneer Valley Regional School, is that the new alignments have all three moving up from their current divisions. Programs have a chance to appeal their placement over the next month, and the actual finalized alignments will be released early next year.
Remember, the statewide tournament features eight divisions, but the western part of the state is only involved in four of them. Thankfully, it appears the state has scrapped the old division-naming format and gone with the much easier to understand 1 through 8. Say goodbye to division IV-A. Sorry to see you go. We hardly knew ya.
The four divisions that the 39 WMass teams are involved in are 3, 5, 7 and 8, with nine teams in the Division 3 field, and 10 teams in each of the other three. Here’s how it breaks down, and feel free to go to MIAA.net and navigate to the football page to get a more comprehensive look at the alignments.
Division 3 — Central, Chicopee Comp, Holyoke, Agawam, Minnechaug, Westfield, Amherst, Longmeadow and Ludlow.
Division 5 — Commerce, West Springfield, Northampton, East Longmeadow, Belchertown, South Hadley, Wahconah, Monument Mt., Easthampton and Frontier.
Division 7 — Putnam, Pittsfield, Chicopee, Pathfinder, Taconic, Mt. Greylock, Palmer, Pioneer, Turners Falls, and Lee.
Division 8 — Franklin Tech, McCann Tech, Smith Voke, Mahar, Athol, Hoosac Valley, Greenfield, Mohawk, Drury and Ware.
If you are reading those for the first time, I’m sure a few things leap off the page at you, and there are question marks in every division. If you do see something that makes you scratch your head, here’s the problem: You are using common sense. The MIAA did not factor any common sense into the new alignments, and that sounds like it’s exactly what the football committee wanted.
“I don’t think there were any arbitrary decisions made,” MIAA president and Athol athletic director Dave King said. “It is what it is, based on the numbers. It’s very transparent, and that’s what they wanted it to be.”
Give the committee some credit. Even if you dislike the alignments, you can’t say the committee isn’t being transparent. In fact, it’s just the opposite. On the MIAA website is a very detailed breakdown of how the alignments were figured out, and it all comes down to numbers. The committee aligned schools based on enrollment (and in the case of cooperatives, rather than add the enrollment of both schools together, the committee used the enrollment of the largest school).
The committee then took into account five “factors” to move schools around. Vocational schools moved down three divisions, and urban schools moved down two divisions. Cooperative teams moved up one division. Private schools moved up a division, although there are none of those among the WMass schools, and finally, teams were adjusted based on their current roster. If a roster has less than 25 players, it moved down two divisions, if it has 25 to 40 it moved down one division, 41 to 60 was no adjustment, 61 to 80 moved up, and 81 or more moved up two divisions.
So, take a school like Greenfield, which has 183 male students in grades 9 through 12 and is currently in what will become Division 7. Greenfield picked up a minus-2 because of its urban setting, and also picked up a minus-2 for having a roster smaller than 25 players, so it had a total of minus-4. Greenfield was actually already placed in Division 8 because its enrollment is smaller than when the previous alignments were created, but this cemented its place.
Another example would be schools like Athol or Mahar, which were initially placed in Division 7. Because both schools have an urban setting, and because both schools had rosters between 25 and 40 players, they earned a factor of minus-3 and both moved down to Division 8.
There’s one major glaring omission from the current format. Not every school had a roster-size listed, and wouldn’t you know that of the three local schools who are placed in higher divisions than common sense would dictate, all three did not submit rosters. Pioneer has less than 20 kids, so it should have a minus-2 in the roster category, and both Turners Falls and Frontier should have minus-1, but all three have no number there.
The result is that schools like Lee (116 boys), Turners Falls (121) and Pioneer (122), which have the three smallest male enrollments in western Mass. and were initially put into Division 8, get bumped up a division because they don’t have negative factors, and Frontier, which was also initially placed in Division 8, gets moved up two divisions.
“I really don’t think it fits,” Turners Falls coach Chris Lapointe said. “Not just in our case, but in many school’s cases. I don’t see where this proposal makes sense.”
Again, sense is not one of the determining factors. When it comes to alignment, the MIAA can be a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation. King admitted that in the past there has been some common sense applied when trying to figure out divisions, but this can lead to criticism as well, and in those cases, there is nothing to point to for justification. The problem with not using common sense is that in cases like this, the determining factors may not exactly work to produce the most competitive divisions.
So where are the most glaring problems? In Division 3, Amherst and Ludlow are the most obvious teams in need of relief, since either can hardly compete against teams from the lowest divisions. The common-sense answer would be to move both down, and bring West Springfield and either East Longmeadow or Northampton up.
As for Division 5, the issues are with Frontier, Easthampton, Belchertown and Monument Mt., all four of which will never be able to compete, even on their best years. If Frontier had a roster factor involved, it might get moved down, so we will wait to see how that appeal turns out. Monument is one of the weakest teams in the Berkshires and not usually even in the playoff hunt, and Easthampton would be best situated in Division 7. Belchertown is in the right division in terms of enrollment (354 boys), but the Orioles rarely have a strong team, and would be best suited to play in Division 7.
Obviously, moving those four down would mean that you would need to bring four other teams up, but the great news is that Division 7 is full of teams that should be moved up. Take Putnam, which co-ops with Sci-Tech and has a roster of 67 players, which is the third largest in western Mass. Putnam was initially put in Division 3 but, due to its urban and vocational factors, it drops down. The school has a male enrollment of 780. So Putnam moves up. Taconic is another team currently playing in the Division III (what will become Division 5) Super Bowl, yet the Braves are somehow being moved down a division. Again, the factors make the difference, even if common sense may not dictate the move. Pittsfield (465) and Chicopee (443) have larger male enrollments than all but two of the schools in Division 5, yet both are moved down to Division 7 because of urban factors.
And then there are the teams in Division 7 that should move down. That includes Lee, Turners Falls, Pioneer, Palmer and Pathfinder. The problem is that there are really only three or four teams in Division 8 that should move up — Athol, Mahar, Hoosac Valley and Greenfield the most likely candidates. Because Division 8 should be home to the Tech schools (Pathfinder, Smith Voke, McCann and Franklin Tech), it could be an 11-team division. Here’s how the divisions should look in my opinion, and please feel free to weigh in:
Division 3 — Central, Chicopee Comp, Holyoke, Agawam, Northampton, Minnechaug, Westfield, Longmeadow and West Springfield.
Division 5 — Amherst, Commerce, East Longmeadow, South Hadley, Wahconah, Putnam, Pittsfield, Taconic, Chicopee.
Division 7 — Mahar, Athol, Hoosac Valley, Greenfield, Mt. Greylock, Monument Mt., Easthampton, Belchertown, Ludlow, and Frontier.
Division 8 — Franklin Tech, McCann Tech, Pathfinder, Smith Voke, Mohawk, Drury, Ware, Palmer, Pioneer, Turners Falls, and Lee.
And so we wait to see how it all shakes out following the appeal process.
Turners Falls High School may have gotten shafted a bit by having to travel to Williams College Friday night to play Mt. Greylock Regional High School in the WMass Division IV-A championship game at 6.
The Indians are the top seeds in the tournament yet they are being forced to play the title game on the field that the second-seeded Mounties actually practice on, according to one person. The facility may be very nice, but it does give the lower-seeded Mounties a huge home-field edge.
Or does it? One suggestion as to why the Turners Falls-Greylock game was chosen for Williams College is because tournament organizers know that the Indians have one of the most passionate fan bases in all of western Mass. and that Turners Falls fans will make the trip no matter how far away the game is. Can’t say that for all the programs in the area, although kudos to the Pioneer fans, who showed up in much larger numbers for this past Friday’s playoff game than Greenfield fans show up for Turkey Day when the game is in Turners Falls.
See you in Williamstown on Friday night, Indian fans.
I’ve got to hand it to Franklin Tech football fans, who have spent the past few days working me over for picking Drury in this past weekend’s football game in Turners Falls, which the Eagles won 47-26. Included in the “feedback” was one parent visiting my Facebook page and posting a picture of the scoreboard with the final score on it. Good stuff.
Problem is that I actually picked Franklin Tech, but when the grid was put on the page, a transcription error left me with Drury. My justification for picking the Eagles? Franklin Tech actually had something to play for. With the win over Drury, Franklin Tech now needs to beat Belchertown this weekend for a good shot at qualifying for the State Small School Vocational Super Bowl.
Jason Butynski is a Greenfield native and Recorder sportswriter. His email address is jbutynski@recorder.com. Like him on Facebook and leave your feedback at www.facebook.com/jaybutynski.