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By John Nolan
Assistant Director of Scouting/Content Management 

The Virginia High School League’s Executive Committee voted unanimously today to end the conference alignment system that has been in place since 2014 and return VHSL to a district system, reports the Virginia Pilot. VHSL will not return to the A, AA, AAA system from before, but will remain with 6 classifications. The change will take effect in the 2018 high school baseball season.

The new system will break each classification down into four regions, ranging from 8 to 17 schools in each region. While it is not clear yet, it is likely that each Region will continue to send two teams to States, giving us back the eight team State Tournament that has been missing since the end of the 2013 postseason.

It has not yet been announced how the individual Regions will be broken up into Districts or how the many teams will advance to each Region Tournament. In the old system, each Region was on their own to create a system that worked for it, ranging from 8 teams to 16 teams in the Regional tournaments. Based on the smaller size of these Regions, it would be hard to imagine most of the Regions having more than eight participants, with a few of the larger ones going to twelve.

Here is the link to the Alignment Plan, with schools assigned to a Region but not broken up by district yet. We will have more information as it becomes available.