ST. GEORGE — Southern Utah’s 4A schools will play under a new moniker starting in fall 2021: Region 10.
The Utah High School Activities Association Board of Trustees approved a new alignment for high school regions and classifications on Dec. 17, creating a new region in 5A and reducing 4A to only two regions.
The implications go deeper than a name change, with a reduced competition pool both in the classification and the region. With the controversial results, the UHSAA executive committee — which tiers just below the board of trustees in UHSAA’s infrastructure — chairman and Washington County School District Secondary Education/Facilities Executive Director Craig Hammer said the board is just trying to give kids the chance to compete.
“They’re trying to make it as fair as they can for all kids,” Hammer said. “I don’t see any malintent. It’s such a difficult, difficult thing to do. Man, it’s hard.”
The challenge is to balance the competition level with geographic convenience. The goal of realignment — and the reason it is done every two years — is to competitively balance Utah’s regions so that no schools feel that they can’t hold their own against their opponents, regardless of the dynamic nature of school sizes, while simultaneously accounting for travel.
Much of what is currently known as Region 9 draws itself: the eight schools in the region all are fairly similar in attendance rates and five of them are in the St. George metropolitan area — One is in Hurricane and two are in Cedar City. No one team is more than an hour’s drive from another.
But the ability to compete is causing Canyon View to throw away that convenience. Many of the school’s sports have struggled mightily in Region 9. As previously reported by St. George News, the Falcons have lost more than 200 of their fewer than 300 in-region contests since reclassification in 2016 promoted the area’s teams to 4A.
Per the data used by UHSAA to determine classifications and obtained by St. George News, Canyon View High School enrolls nearly 100 students fewer than Cedar High School, the smallest 4A school in the new alignment, in grades 11 and 12. Cedar is getting a big boom from its current sophomore class, but Canyon View doesn’t share that fortune. Cedar enrolls 981 students in grades 10-12, while Canyon View enrolls 836.
Because of this, Canyon View requested to be moved back to 3A, despite increasing travel times significantly for in-region play. It leaves the soon-to-be Region 10 with only seven teams (eight if Tuacahn Center for the Performing Arts — which does not offer athletics — is included). In the new alignment, that is still more than half of the entire 4A classification.
The realignment dissolves the current 4A Region 10, distributing its seven teams across 5A and sends two to 3A. The five new teams in 5A was enough justification to create a new region in that classification, bringing the total to five. However, this leaves only two regions in 4A, with Region 11’s six teams unchanged by the new alignment.
The new 5A has 33 teams. There are only 13 in 4A.
No longer are there enough teams to fill out a traditional 16-team bracket in the state tournament. This has raised some questions about the end-of-season championships.
“The question comes up: Is the purpose of the state tournament to get the best teams in there, or is the purpose of the state tournament to let everybody play?” Hammer asked. “That’s really the crux of the issue right there.”
It’s a question Hammer, a former member of the Board of Trustees, no longer has to answer. He said that it was great to see Pine View and Sky View, the top two 4A teams by RPI, match up in the state football championships. The end result was a memorable game between the state’s top two teams that ran down to the wire. On the other side, he also noted that Rob McDaniel, the principal at Cyprus High School, gave an impassioned plea about how good it is for his school for students to even play in a state tournament, let alone win a championship.
Several Region 9 coaches expressed the sentiment that it’s ultimately out of their hands and that a state championship is still a state championship, regardless of the path to get there. Doug Meacham, coach of Snow Canyon boys basketball, noted that the remaining pool of schools in 4A often accounts for most of the state tournament bracket in his sport anyway.
Mike Esplin, Cedar’s boys basketball coach, did not mince words, however.
“Thirteen teams in 4A is a bunch of crap,” Esplin said. “5A and 6A control Utah high school athletics and they said, ‘Well, we don’t want to play down.’ They don’t want to play us, come down and get beat and it’s such a long trip. Thirteen teams is a joke … We can’t even fill a field of 16. I know they’ll say it’s geographically (based) and numbers and stuff, but they could’ve done it differently.”
Esplin and the rest of Cedar sports loses its cross-town rival, though Esplin noted they’ll still play in nonregion competition.
In the meantime, Region 9 presses on with its final seasons in basketball, wrestling and swimming already underway. Region play for basketball begins in January.
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