I was in a discussion where everyone was talking about will the local high school team make regional or sectionals or state etc. I have no idea what the levels mean and what order they move to the next. This is track for high school. Any information is appreciated.
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It varies by state and by sport. It’s not ubiquitous.
There are different divisions based on the size of the school. It would be grossly unfair for a HS of 200 students that can barely muster 15 kids on a football team to compete against a school of 3000 that has 80 kids on their varsity team.
The highest level of competition is called “varsity,” and is the only level people (outside of friends and family of the players) really care about.
The next highest is called “junior varsity” and is usually younger high schoolers who aren’t yet good enough to be on the varsity team. If you’re an older high schooler who’s good enough for junior varsity but not good enough for varsity, you probably quit the sport halfway through high school.
Some larger schools will have a “freshman” or a “C” team for the youngest of students who aren’t yet good enough for junior varsity.
It’s more or less a way to thin out the completion as you advance through the various levels for a competition. For high schools, there are often several schools per county, and several counties per state, so how to you get the best of the best? You subdivide the competition based on area.
So one county with 10 schools holds a competition and the top three schools with the highest points advances to the “sectionals.” In sectionals, those three schools from the one county are now facing the five surrounding counties and their top three schools. Out of those 15 schools, the top three schools then advance to the “regionals,” which in turn face five other “sectional” finalist. Then regionals have the top three schools/athletes (because at this point, it is more like individual athletes are continuing since a single school doesn’t win every event), and they compete against other winners of their respective “sectional.” Regional goes to semi state, semi state goes to state, state goes to tri-state, and tri-state goes to nationals.
Much in the same sense of any competitive sport, you have to enter local competitions in order to advance to the next level. The Olympics are not going to have some regular participants because they didn’t vet the competition, they look at people who have won competitions in their respective sport to see who is the best of the best.
Little Timmy from rural school A, who is able to run a five minute mile, may beat the local schools, but he doesn’t stand a chance against Arnold who can do a 4:20 mile, thus the high school athletic association is not going to pit those two against each other since Little Timmy will get eliminated in the sectional/regional conferences.
It’s basically set up like a tournament. So you’re paying people local to you first to then play to somebody from a bigger region then places from somebody from a bigger region and then play the best teams in the state. If you don’t understand this, you might not understand that there are different classes in almost every state for sports as well. There might be a, B, AA, or even triple AAA or quadruple AAA. These are primarily based on enrollment numbers, so some small school doesn’t have the expectation of being as good as a big school. They just pull their athletes from a smaller group so it wouldn’t be fair for them to play the biggest schools in the state.
The levels of competition vary by state and sometimes by sport. I live in NJ, the two broadest divisions are public versus non-public (private and religious) schools. Within public schools schools are grouped based on enrollment size, from group 1 (smallest schools) through group 4 (largest). Private schools have grouped based on A (larger) and group B (smaller). Each enrollment group for public schools is then broken into north and south regions. Many (most?) sports have state playoffs to determine the champions of each group. Some sports have a tournament of champions between the winners of each group although that may have been discontinued.
Other states will have different systems.
I was a swimmer so this is from a swimming perspective, but it’s pretty similar across the board.
As far as an end of season tournament, it usually goes City, County/District/Section then State. There’s usually a qualifying time to make it to the “city championships”, top finishers from each city move on to the district/section/county, then the top finishers there move on to the state meet.
If you “made states” or whatever, you’re typically significantly faster or your team is better than if you just qualified for a city meet.