After five years of battling through class 4A, Cheney fell back to 3A yesterday and we couldn’t be happier about that. It’s not even necessarily the competition level – our girls won state basketball in 2010, we had three state track champs this spring, etc., but 3A is just a better fit. The way Kansas’s six classifications are distributed, 4A is second only to 1A in population disparity (by percentage). We were going up against schools with nearly triple our enrollment in some cases. It’s such a problem that a change was recently proposed to balance it out (though it was shot down… don’t get me started).
3A will still present plenty of challenges (starting right in our own league), but it’ll be lot nicer in a classification where the largest school is only 61% larger than the smallest versus the 183% spread in 4A.
My CC boys did get a quick wake-up call yesterday. Armed with our much-increased odds of qualifying for state in 3A, we had planned on easily defending our Halstead meet title from last year. We finished 3rd behind fellow 3A schools Halstead and Marion. It was close (59, 61, 65), but not what we were hoping for. Still had several PR’s and looking forward to our first home meet since 2002 next week.