WPIAL Class 6A football to shrink again as Baldwin, Hempfield, Norwin drop

By: Chris Harlan
Tuesday, December 21, 2021 | 4:31 PM

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The WPIAL’s largest football classification just keeps getting smaller.

WPIAL Class 6A had eight teams this fall, but that number is likely shrinking to five before next season with Hempfield, Norwin and Baldwin all dropping to 5A, according to information from the schools.

The new cutoff for Class 6A football is 558 boys, according to updated PIAA parameters released Monday, and all three schools fall below that number. That leaves the WPIAL with only North Allegheny, Seneca Valley, Mt. Lebanon, Canon-McMillan and Central Catholic playing 6A football.

What that means for the future of the WPIAL’s largest classification is unclear.

WPIAL executive director Amy Scheuneman noted that teams still have until Jan. 5 to voluntarily play up to Class 6A, so she declined to speculate.

“We don’t need to come up with every scenario until we know what we have,” she said.

Another WPIAL team could voluntarily join 6A, but for now there appears to be only five. Norwin, Hempfield and Baldwin all indicated they won’t play up.

“We are very, very happy,” Norwin athletic director Mike Burrell said of joining 5A.

The PIAA sorts schools into classifications every two years based on enrollment. The PIAA likely won’t reveal those new alignments until next month, but schools already know their teams’ new classifications.

Baldwin knew for weeks that its football team was headed down to 5A, but drops by Hempfield and Norwin came as last-minute surprises. Both remained 6A teams until the PIAA on Dec. 8 asked schools to fix the way they counted vo-tech students.

Norwin and Hempfield dropped to 5A after resubmitting their enrollment numbers, this time counting only 10% of vo-tech students, as the PIAA instructed.

“In all the years that I’ve done it, we’ve never taken the vo-tech kids out,” Burrell said. “We’ve always put them in our enrolled numbers.”

That seemed to be true at a number of WPIAL schools. The vo-tech fix wasn’t significant statewide but did impact numbers for dozens of WPIAL schools, said PIAA administrators Bob Lombardi and Melissa Mertz.

Around 70 WPIAL schools updated their enrollment count.

“The numbers did shift a bit,” Mertz said. “You’re going to see it more in (Western Pennsylvania) because there is a large amount of vo-tech students who had not been in the (correct) column before.”

For example, Norwin needed to count only 10% of its 74 vo-tech boys, dropping its PIAA enrollment number to 547. Class 5A football includes teams with 383 to 557 boys in grades 9-11, the years counted by the PIAA for determining classes.

However, the recount didn’t impact only Class 6A, and it didn’t impact only football.

Yet, the entire landscape of the 2022-23 and 2023-24 realignment won’t be known until the PIAA releases a list of updated enrollment numbers for all schools. Lombardi said the PIAA likely will wait to reveal those until after Jan. 5, the deadline for schools to voluntarily play up.

According to information provided by the schools, North Allegheny has around 1,100 boys, Seneca Valley has 817, Mt. Lebanon has 703 and Canon-McMillan has 563, putting them in Class 6A football. Central Catholic’s numbers were not available, but the school indicated it intended to play 6A football regardless of enrollment.

Butler, another WPIAL Class 6A school, plays football instead in District 10.

The WPIAL steering committees for fall sports are scheduled to meet the week of Jan. 10 with hopes of having new conferences and sections approved by the WPIAL board Jan. 18. If all goes as planned, schools would receive 2022 fall schedules in February, Scheuneman said.

Chris Harlan is a TribLive reporter covering sports. He joined the Trib in 2009 after seven years as a reporter at the Beaver County Times. He can be reached at charlan@triblive.com.

Tags: Hempfield, Norwin