Sports commentary: Making sense of Class B confusion

I've been hearing some chatter about how post-season play works, so I did some investigating to try to make sense of this game of musical chairs that it seems like the teams are playing to continue to advance.

To start things off, there are seven districts for boys and girls basketball in Class B in Montana. They are literally numbered one through seven for naming purposes. Those seven districts are grouped into three divisions simply called Northern, Western and Southern. Bigfork is in District 7B, which is in the Western Division.

That is the easy part to understand. Everything gets a little more complicated from there because Class B is home to so many teams — 43 to be exact. In contrast, Class A only has 23 teams. Those teams are broken into four divisions with six teams each, except for the Northwest which was left with five teams when Bigfork moved to Class B. Since Class A has such a small number of schools, a district tournament is not necessary to narrow down which teams advance into post-season tournaments. However, now that Bigfork is a Class B school again, teams will have to get used to this format, which is quite a numbers game.

Two years ago when the classes were realigned by enrollment numbers, which is how Bigfork ended up moving to Class B, the districts in Class B were reconfigured. Prior to the realignment, there were eight districts and four divisions. Although the overall number of teams had stayed about the same after the reconfiguration, where they were located in relation to one another geographically was different enough to warrant a change according to the schools.

The end result was that Class B was broken its current into seven districts in three divisions. The Northern Division has District 1B with seven schools and District 2B with six schools. The Western Division has District 6B and 7B, which each have six schools. The Southern Division has District 3B, 4B and 5B and each of those has six schools.

Since the Southern Division has 18 schools in it, compared to the Northern with 13 and the Western with 12, it was decided by the schools in Class B that the Southern Division should receive more spots at the state tournament than the other divisions. When that system was decided on, the Western Division only had 11 schools since Bigfork was still in Class A, so it was decided that the Northern Division, with 13 schools, should have some additional representation at State as well.

So, a system was implemented that gives the Western Division two spots at state every year (which in case I've lost you is Bigfork's division). The Southern Division gets four spots except for every third year when they get three and that extra spot goes to the Northern Division, which usually has just two. Since this is a "third year," the Northern Division will send three teams to State, the Southern will also send three and the Western will continue to send two.

Being a Bigfork athlete, coach, fan, etc., this likely seems unfair considering how well the Vikes and Vals are doing this season and how tough the competition is in the Western Division. But, it must be remembered that this system is not a system for just this year; it is set up to fit the needs of the schools for any given year.

This is the same system that is used for volleyball, but other sports have different strategies for dealing with the post-season. For example, in track the Northern and Western Divisions each send six athletes for each event and the Southern Division sends eight. In football, the playoff system gives each district two spots every year and then each year two districts get an additional spot. Next year is District 7B's turn for three spots as well as District 4B. By rotating through the districts, there isn't such a concern about number of schools since all of the districts have a similar number of teams.

It should also be noted that the schools can choose to come up with a new plan to be implemented for any sport if they decide there should be a change. That is not entirely unlikely either since schools will continue to move up and down through the classes as enrollment numbers shift. In fact, Ronan is right on the cusp of being in Class B territory for enrollment numbers. If they do go to Class B, it makes the most sense that they would be in the Western Division, which would mean that the Northern and Western Divisions would have the same number of schools.

Again, it is a big numbers game, and, when your team is clearly being shorted on spots that they may even deserve, it can be a little hard to watch. We all felt horrible that the Vikings football team didn't get to participate in the playoffs because this wasn't District 7B's year for a third spot, but to quote my parents, "Life isn't fair," and at some point everyone voted and decided that this is the fairest way to do things. I know that we could all come up with other ways to calculate these berths and have all thought of new ways to do tiebreakers, but, like so many tasks in life, we should remember that it's easier to make those suggestions when we aren't in the driver's seat.