That is a good post, Smokey. You make some good points and it is true that you could move some teams down in classification and they probably still would not be competitive.

The girls soccer example is different than a lot of sports. For one thing not all the schools have girls soccer teams. Soccer is a sport that kids in the metropolitan areas participate in year around on club teams and they travel all over the country to play top competition club tournament games. Teams in the metro areas will definitely have advantages over non metropolitan areas for that reason. Also the 5A example could somewhat be solved in soccer if soccer split their classes differently. Why is 6A alone and then 5 thru 1A in one classification for their state competition? I suppose it might have something to do with not all the smaller schools having soccer teams but from a competition standpoint due to what I said previously about the metropolitan advantages with the club teams it should be 6A and 5A combined and then 4A thru 1A in one class. Even if they did that two of the teams St. James last year's champion and Aquinas girls last year's runner up would probably have finished the same way in a combined 6A-5A as I know Aquinas beat the 6A champion Blue Valley West during the season.