The UHSAA Board of Trustees finalized its realignment for classifications and regions for 2021-23 Thursday after much deliberation and shuffling of schools. Both alignments for football regions and all other sports were approved with a 13-1 vote.
Some of the biggest changes involved Roy moving to Region 2, Class 5A expanding to five regions with 4A slimming to two regions, and the return of 1A football.
The changes will take effect next fall for the start of the 2021-22 school year. The board of trustees meets every two years to realign schools based on changing enrollments.
Roy requested to move from the northern Region 1 to Salt Lake Valley’s Region 2 in Wednesday night’s public hearing with the board of trustees for competitive purposes, and that motion was approved.
For all sports except football, there will now be 26 teams in 6A, 33 teams in 5A, 13 in 4A, 22 in 3A, 24 in 2A, and 28 in 1A.
One of the biggest sticking points for the board of trustees was what to do with 4A in all sports, and specifically the bubble schools at the top of 4A and the bottom of 5A.
In the end, the board ended up moving Cedar Valley, Stansbury, Tooele and Uintah from 4A to 5A to make a new centralized Region 7 with Cottonwood, Hillcrest and Payson.
Uintah had actually requested to move down to 3A for football.
Stansbury and Tooele were two schools that expressed concerns in previous board of trustees meetings about the viability of a centralized 4A region knowing Cedar Valley’s enrollment had increased enough to make it a 5A school, and with Ogden and Ben Lomond requesting a drop to 3A — which was granted.
Stansbury and Tooele said they preferred to move up to 5A instead of being placed in a 4A region with primarily Cache Valley teams.
Mountain Ridge is the lone school moving from 5A to 6A in this new realignment, while Northridge dropped from 6A to 5A.
For football regions, the state is expanding back to six classifications as 1A will return after a two-year hiatus.
East didn’t petition to play up in 6A during this latest realignment, while Cottonwood will remain independent. Timpanogos and Payson played an independent schedule last year, but by being placed into Region 7 for football they’ve agreed to drop independence for football.
Park City and Mountain View have been 5A schools in all sports but football the past two years, but the committee is moving them to 5A in all sports beginning in 2021, along with Uintah, Tooele and Stansbury.
The board of trustees also proposed that a committee be formed to look more closely at how realignment is handled, one of which is whether the need for regions still exists with RPI rankings being used to seed the playoffs.