Return to 4 classes among options on the table for WPIAL football realignment

By: Chris Harlan
Thursday, October 23, 2025 | 7:53 PM

Ten years after high school football expanded to six classifications, the WPIAL might consider going back to four.

That idea is among a handful of proposals submitted to the WPIAL office, varying plans for realigning conferences that the football steering committee will soon discuss.

“There are four different possibilities, and that’s one of them,” WPIAL administrator Vince Sortino said.

The WPIAL divides football teams into new conferences every two years, a process that started with the PIAA collecting updated enrollment data from schools. Sortino said the 10-person WPIAL football committee will meet in late November or early December to tackle realignment.

When they’re done, football conferences could look quite different. Sortino said the WPIAL wants to move quickly.

“Whatever the committee decides to go with as a recommendation, I hope we would be able to institute for the next cycle coming up,” he said.

The next two-year cycle includes the 2026 and ’27 football seasons.

Among the varying proposals, Fox Chapel submitted a plan last month to drastically change the way football conferences are created. The plan groups teams into seven classifications by on-field success and roster size rather than enrollment.

Sortino said an alternate plan would form geographic “leagues” including teams from more than one classification. He said the idea reminded him of his time as athletic director at Dallastown in PIAA District 3, which uses cross-classification leagues for football.

The proposals submitted to the WPIAL try to address common concerns about competitive balance, travel or the loss of traditional rivalries, among other topics.

“There are four different proposals — different areas that we’re going to look at — to try to make an impact,” Sortino said. “That’s why we have a committee. We’re going to get together to talk. There’s a process to it.”

The football committee could reject all of the proposals and instead recommend keeping things largely the same, he said. In the most recent realignment two years ago, the WPIAL took a bigger stab at balancing the conferences by moving some teams around.

Maybe that is done more.

“We had tremendous, positive feedback from our schools that they loved it,” Sortino said. “That’s another option. Do we stay with the current one and tweak it? Make it better?”

The PIAA expanded football to six classifications statewide for the 2016 season with mixed results. Ever since, there have been calls by some in the WPIAL to revert to four here.

Sortino said that’s an option.

“One of proposals was to see if it’s possible to consolidate classifications,” said Sortino, noting that, if so, the WPIAL would devise a process for determining the six state playoff qualifiers.

Football expansion was first presented as a way to narrow the enrollment gap between the biggest and smallest schools in each classification. But the addition of two classifications also thinned the number of teams playing in each class.

“I think any time you do that, there’s an argument it diluted the competition. Then again, when you expand, there’s more opportunities for success for schools that haven’t been successful,” Sortino said. “But you run into problems in our part of the state. Our larger classifications get hurt.”

He noted that the current format hasn’t worked for the biggest schools because the WPIAL has so few playing football in Class 6A. There are seven teams now, up from five in 2022 and ‘23.

“You feel bad for those schools and the kids, so we’re always looking for opportunities,” Sortino said. “How can we get two or three sections in 6A? Is it by combining 4A, 5A and 6A to try to do a mixture?”

As athletic director at Dallastown, Sortino got a closer look at a conference system that’s much different than used by the WPIAL. There, football teams join leagues that include opponents of varying classifications.

“When I went out there, I was sort of shocked because I went into a gym and saw these banners all over,” Sortino said. “I’m going, ‘What is the York-Adams League?’ That’s like our (conference) here. Out there, if you win the York-Adams League, some of those kids couldn’t care less about the district. That was big to them.”

Here, the WPIAL could theoretically have leagues in the north, east, west and south. A weighted points system would decide playoff qualifiers, rewarding the teams that played better competition.

“There were no committees (in District 3) because you knew weekly through a power rankings system: Am I making the playoffs?” Sortino said. “The only bad thing about that was, when your star quarterback goes down, the computer system doesn’t know that and there’s not a committee to talk about it.”

The proposal publicized by Fox Chapel was tailored to help struggling teams by letting them play against opponents from a lower classification. Six such teams left WPIAL football for independent schedules in recent years.

Sortino said finding a way to bring those teams back is important to the WPIAL. He said he was optimistic that could happen for some teams this year.

“I’ve already got an email and had conversations with schools that were independent that have asked to come back,” he said.

The WPIAL football committee meets Saturday to seed the brackets for the upcoming playoffs, but Sortino said realignment won’t be on the agenda until after the postseason.

Regardless of whatever decision the committee ultimately recommends, he said it should benefit teams in all classifications.

“We’re looking at all of those options to see if we can move the league — not 6A only, or 5A and 6A — but the league in the right direction,” Sortino 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.