It’s that time of year again, no I’m not talking about Christmas, it’s time for the SCHSL realignment and this year it brings significant changes for both Boiling Springs and Chesnee.
Early Thursday morning news broke (hat tip to Jed Blackwell for being the first to report it) that the SCHSL had released its proposed realignment plans for the 2020-2022 seasons and with it both the Bulldogs and the Eagles will be in new regions next year. The first major change will see the Boiling Springs Bulldogs being split from a lot of their long time region mates as they head to Region III-5A. They will be joined in the five team region with Gaffney, Clover, Fort Mill, and Nation Ford. Their previous region (II-5A) will now consist of Dorman, Byrnes, Spartanburg, Wade Hampton, and Riverside. While it will have a lot of new faces Region III-5A isn’t a new one to the Bulldogs as they were the region champions there in quite a few sports during their first stop in the region as it was their first region during the switch to 5A in 2016. You can read about the 2016 accomplishments in this story from that year. The biggest changes for the Bulldogs will be the large amount of travel time to their new opponents, especially in non-football sports, along with the loss of some long time region matchups against the likes of Spartanburg, Dorman, and Byrnes. A big challenge for the Bulldogs under this new proposal will be travel time for the student-athletes as last year with seven opponents the combined travel in one sport for the Bulldogs in region play was 164 miles but as part of this new realignment proposal they will now be traveling 229 miles amongst four opponents. A part of that comes with the loss of all fellow county schools as the Bulldogs will be the only 5A school in Spartanburg County to not be in the same region with at least one county school. For the Chesnee Eagles they will see a significant change as well as they will now be changing classifications as the Eagles will now be dropping from 3A to 2A. They will be back in familiar territory though as they will be back to the same classification they had always known before the previous realignment. The Eagles will now be in Region II-2A along with Blacksburg, Landrum, Legion Collegiate (Football Only), St. Joseph’s, and two non-football playing schools in Greer Middle College and Brashier Middle College. With the move Chesnee will now return to playing some familiar opponents as they’ll now face county foe Landrum again along with facing a Blacksburg team they have been region mates with before. One challenge the Eagles will face is that they’ll be dealing with playing Charter and Private schools again with three of those schools in their region. It has been an ongoing debate in the state for years about the fairness of those schools playing in a public school league and under the proposed new realignment it will be Chesnee who deals with it for the next two seasons. While the addition of the Charter and Private schools will be a challenge the move to 2A should be a good move for the Eagles as they will now be facing much more like sized schools in the playoffs and during the season unlike the last few years where they were one of the smaller 3A schools. Schools will have a deadline of January 23 to appeal the new realignment proposal and unless there is many changes this will be the regions for the Bulldogs and Eagles for the next two seasons. Comments are closed.
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