The Arizona Interscholastic Association unveiled Tuesday the initial division placement for schools and team sports for the next three school years.

This was the first time that the AIA used a formula and other factors besides enrollment — rankings history, free and reduced lunch — to place schools in their respective divisions. To avoid extreme division changes for some schools, the consultants that created the formula for the AIA recommended that the AIA first place schools in divisions based on their enrollments and then use the formula to move a school up or down a division or not at all.

Some schools such as McClintock and Queen Creek were moved up based on the enrollment numbers they turned in on Oct. 1. McClintock and Queen Creek play football in Division III, but they are Division II schools based on their Oct. 1 enrollment figures. 

Teams and schools can appeal their placement and have until 2 p.m. on Jan. 30 to do so.

"One of the major components that we are trying to accomplish is that we are trying to ensure that if districts want to come together, then that appeal process will have to take place," said Chuck Schmidt, the AIA's associate executive director.  

The section placement for schools won’t be announced until the division appeal process is complete.  

The sports advisory committees for each sport will meet between Feb. 3-10 to hear the appeals before they are presented to the AIA’s board for final approval. Division and section realignment for Arizona’s high schools occurs every two years, but the initial division placement that was released Tuesday is for the next three school years, which will allow Arizona’s border schools to align their schedules with nearby out of state schools.

The AIA will return to its normal two-year realignment block after the 2017-18 school year. The schedules for the teams will change after the first year but will remain the same during the final two years of the three-year scheduling block.

The formula that the AIA used for the initial school/team division placement that was presented Tuesday will be used only one time. When the AIA returns to a two-year block, the sports advisory committees will then help decide whether a team should drop or move up a division based on a team's performances during a scheduling block.

The sports advisory committees can also use the historical strength component of the formula to help support their recommendations for relegation or promotion in the future.

For division placement during the next three school years under the formula the AIA used, the formula didn’t take into account the current division a school is in. The formula also didn’t look at the performance of teams during the current school year.

For rankings history, a median power ranking rating was used to help determine in which division a team would be placed. The formula looked at the performance of a team during the past six seasons to come up with a team’s median rating.

The ratings that the formula looked at are based on the MaxPreps formula (the rankings formula that includes a capped score differential as utilized by MaxPreps and not the rankings as seen on aia365.com). To get the median rating for a team, the formula ignored the top two and bottom two power ranking ratings during that six-year period and used the average of the middle two values to get the median power ranking rating.

If fewer than six years of data was available for a team, the median rating of the available data was used.

The AIA decided to leave the individual sports as is and give the sports advisory committees the opportunity to recommend what schools should be promoted up a division by looking at the past five to six years of sectional and/or state tournament history. But all schools can still appeal the placement of their individual sports.

Here's a link to the individual sports classification process.  

Here's a timeline for the division/section/computer scheduling process for team sports.