The Georgia High School Association will have a new president going forward and one fewer classification beginning in 2024.
The GHSA’s executive committee voted 75-0 Monday in Macon to approve the classification change designed to cut down on competition travel and to appease lawmakers who had cited travel as their No. 1 GHSA concern.
The GHSA also chose Mary Persons Principal Jim Finch as president to replace Glenn White, who is retiring from the position after eight years. The president chairs the GHSA’s powerful board of trustees, whose decisions carry the full weight of the executive committee. It was the board last month that endorsed the plan to reduce the number of classes by one but elected to let the executive committee make the final decision.
The GHSA’ s classification change won’t take effect until the 2024-25 academic year because the GHSA approved reclassification for 2022-23 and 2023-24 in January, and reworking it now would’ve been impractical.
For the next two academic years, the GHSA will have classes 7A through 1A. Class A will be split into Division 1 (larger Class A schools) and Division 2 (smaller Class A schools), each with eight regions. The switch to a larger/smaller Class A split from public/private was approved over the winter.
In 2024, the largest classification will be Class 6A, and there will be 56 regions instead of 64.
Fewer regions typically result in more schools per region and closer proximity between them, which is expected to reduce travel costs and time out of class. As recently as 1998-99, the GHSA operated under only four classifications and 32 regions. The total swelled to 56 in 2016 and to 64 in 2020, partly because of an increasing number of GHSA member schools, now totaling more than 450, but mostly to expand playoff opportunities for schools in all sports.
Eliminating at least one classification long had been a goal of GHSA executive director Robin Hines, though he did not have the power to dictate it. His opinion became more persuasive after state legislators sponsored multiple threatening bills this session, one that would’ve had the GHSA pay schools for travel expenses on trips of 75 miles or more.
In other business Monday, the GHSA voted to:
– Exempt out-of-zone students from counting against the multiplier if they entered their schools’ feeder schools in fifth grade or sooner. The GHSA counts out-of-zone students three times when determining a school’s classification, which is based primarily on enrollment.
– Allow public and charter schools to choose their feeder zone for purposes of defining an out-of-zone student. A private or charter school previously was bound by the public school district in which the school resided.
– Provide a third state championship division in lacrosse.
– Allow girls wrestling to increase its number of weight classes to 14 from 10 and playing dates to 20 from six.
– Make hard courts mandatory for tennis matches unless both teams agree to another court surface.
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