The Georgia High School Association’s proposed competitive-balance reclassification model is dead for now, and the Class 3A-A private playoff division that curtailed private-school sports domination is alive until at least 2028, pending final approval this fall.
The GHSA’s reclassification committee voted 13-5 on Wednesday at a meeting in Thomaston to table any further discussion of competitive balance, a model that proposed to move schools up and down in class based on their sports success instead of their enrollment numbers, until next year.
“It was time to move forward and start clearing the table of stuff that people weren’t interested enough in,” GHSA reclass committee chairman Curt Miller said. “There were several proposals that just never got enough steam.”
After four reclass meetings this year that were designed to hear other proposals, Miller said the committee now will focus on tweaking the current model, which covers the 2024-25 and 2025-26 academic years, and extending it through 2027-28.
Gainesville athletic director Adam Lindsey, who developed the GHSA’s competitive-balance idea, said that his model’s fate should have been decided by the full 66-member executive committee, which must approve any reclassification plan. Lindsey has met with dozens of Georgia athletic directors over the past two years, pitching his plan, and he won the endorsement of first-year GHSA executive director Tim Scott and his predecessor, Robin Hines.
“It’s disappointing that so much time and effort by so many has been put into creating a system that brings balance to the reclassification process while taking out the subjectivities of our current reclass system, and it is never really given a fair shot even with so much support from the state,” Lindsey said. “The data consistently shows the need for this kind of system. The schools at the bottom continue to be forgotten about to protect those at the top. And with over half of the country doing some sort of competitive balance, it seems that it would just simply be a matter of time before the GHSA transitions, but apparently it just isn’t going to be right now.”
Miller said one tweak to the current model could be to allow a certain percentage of schools with lower-performing sports programs the option of dropping down in class. That is a tenet of competitive balance. But under the GHSA’s current model, there is no avenue for high-performing schools to move up.
The current format also calls for private schools in classes 3A to A to compete against each other for most state titles, separate from public schools. The competitive-balance model would have freed the privates to compete with public schools and let the outcomes determine their future classifications.
With the Class 3A-A private division in place in 2024-25, the GHSA’s 44 private schools won 30 of the GHSA’s 183 team championships. Without a 3A-A private playoff division in 2023-24, private schools won 58 state titles.
Eight private schools are classified above 3A, with seven in Class 4A. That leaves six of the GHSA’s eight state-playoff brackets virtually free of private schools.
The reclass committee also voted 13-5 on Wednesday to recommend using power ratings to seed playoffs in all classifications, breaking away from the traditional method of seeding based on region finish. Four of the eight playoff classes used power ratings in 2024-25, although teams with higher region finishes got certain preferential seeding.
For the next cycle, the committee recommends guaranteeing region champions a top-16 seed but letting the power ratings determine the rest. In the current cycle, region champions are guaranteed top-eight seeds in 32-team draws. The new plan would not guarantee a playoff berth to a top-four finisher from region play.
The next reclass meeting will be in August. All reclassification changes would take effect for the 2026-27 academic year.
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